I briefly met Brad Lander, candidate for Bill De Blasio’s city council seat, yesterday in front of PS 321 (his kids go to PS 107). He told me that he was going to participate in the Brooklyn PTA Fun Run on Friday night in Prospect Park.

Lander seemed a little bit embarrassed to talk about his campaign for an election that is more than a year away. “There’s a really important election first,” he said (I may be paraphrasing there). That was endearing. But the City Council race is definitely heating up and the field is filling up for De Blasio and Yassky’s spots.

Lander strikes me as a smart and low-key guy who obviously cares an awful lot about affordable housing, public schools, and Brooklyn communities. He can’t be that low key if he’s a politician. And he’s got an impressive resume: He’s got two master’s degrees – one in City and Regional Planning from Pratt and a second in Social Anthropology from the University College London. He also holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Chicago.

In his current capacity as Director of the Pratt Center for Community Development, Brad works to preserve and strengthen neighborhood quality of life, promote sustainability, and create opportunity in low-income areas.

Under his leadership, the Center’s successes include winning community-sensitive zoning in Bedford Stuyvesant, preserving affordable housing for public housing residents on Staten Island, convening a new grassroots coalition dedicated to transit improvements in low-income neighborhoods, and helping to create new parks as part of a greenway along the Bronx River.

Before Pratt, he was the director of the Fifth Avenue Committee. All and all, an impressive resume for the job.

Hey, Brad how was the fun run?

Brooklyn PTA is a new group with a website.

As budget cuts of $450 million loom, teams from the PS10, PS29, PS39, PS 107, PS 139, Brooklyn New School (PS 146), and PS 295 will join forces to run, raise funds jointly for their schools, and challenge the Bloomberg Administration’s proposed cuts. Funds raised from the run will be shared equally among participating schools, with 50% of the total split equally amongst all the schools that participate, and 50% divided up based on the size of the schools.