After being introduced by CCDC Chair Hal Sadler, Nancy Graham speaks publicly for the first time as the agency’s incoming president.

As the headhunter hired to research the “four or five dozen” people in the world with the skill set to run the Centre City Development Corp., Bob Watkins says Nancy Graham’s name kept popping up. He wanted to meet her. “I called and said, ‘I’m coming to Florida, I just want to have a cup of coffee with you,’” he says.

Watkins made the trip to West Palm Beach, Fla. The pair met at a Starbucks at City Place, a redevelopment project Graham helped bring about. On Oct. 27 Graham was introduced as CCDC’s new president, emerging from a group of candidates that once numbered in the hundreds.

Graham, 54, smoothly addressed the crowd from the podium and then later stood in a circle of journalists, fielding questions. While shy on details about Downtown San Diego redevelopment, she pledged to “get more housing that is affordable to anyone” and said that mix should include rental and for-sale. As mayor of West Palm Beach, a city on the wrong side of the glittery tracks, she successfully promoted affordable housing as a way to get people to move to a downtown that essentially closed at 5 p.m. One program set aside a portion of a renter’s monthly payment for use in a later purchase.

On the subject of commercial development, Graham says that subsidies can sometimes be appropriate, especially to assist smaller business that serve residents. “You don’t just build all residential to the exclusion of hotels and commercial; jobs.”

Graham, who officially replaces the retiring Peter Hall on Dec. 1, is a partner with N-K Ventures LLC, an urban redevelopment consulting service. She was the first person elected mayor of West Palm Beach in 1991 after a charter change created a strong-mayor form of government. Before that she practiced law for 10 years, specializing in land use, zoning, planning and environmental law.

CCDC director Gil Johnson, who headed the selection committee, says her ability to get people engaged is a strength for dealing with Downtown’s evolving issues.

Graham exhibits an easy sense of humor. She compares the time waiting for the job to a pregnancy. “Now we can go out and say ‘it’s a girl,’” she says. On her interviews with CCDC’s board: “I was heavily grilled, roasted and toasted,” she says. And of 6-foot-4-inch Peter Hall’s encouragement earlier that day that she try out his office chair. “I felt like a kid in a high chair.”