Maria Torres-Springer, currently president and CEO of the city’s Economic Development Corporation, will replace Been. Torres-Springer worked at EDC during the Bloomberg administration and was de Blasio’s first Small Business Services commissioner.

The EDC will be led by James Patchett, currently chief of staff to Alicia Glen, deputy mayor for housing and economic development. Glen’s most trusted adviser, Patchett is credited with spearheading a deal to preserve 5,000 middle-income apartments at Stuyvesant Town-Peter Cooper Village in 2015. He will be replaced by Glen’s senior adviser, Peter Wertheim.

In an interview at a coffee shop near her Greenwich Village home on Monday, Been called her decision to leave “very bittersweet.”

“I love the agency. I love what I do. There’s lots of things that I would still love to do,” she told POLITICO New York. “But I feel like you should leave before people want you to leave and you should leave before you want to leave because if you want to leave, it signals that you got too burned out.”

De Blasio, in a statement, said, “With her signature brand of grit and grace, Vicki created and implemented our ambitious affordable housing plan. She is a brilliant public servant and law professor, and her students are lucky to have her back.”

In a phone interview Monday, Glen said she opted to elevate her aides, rather than conduct a broader search for Been’s replacement, because of uncertainty facing the city’s housing plan under the incoming Trump administration.

“You always want to look at the family first, and if there’s great people in the family and people like James, (who) demonstrated (his) ability to step up, you want to reward those people,” she said.

Under Been, the housing agency closed financing on 20,854 new apartments and preserved another 41,652 over three years. That puts the mayor ahead of schedule for his goal of building and preserving 200,000 apartments for low- to moderate-income tenants.

But the agency’s work has not been without difficulties.

In an hour-long interview, Been discussed the highlights and challenges, her concerns for a housing program that relies on federal funding and her upbringing in a Colorado mining town, where her only path to college was winning a cooking contest.

Most residents of Been’s hometown, 15 miles from a uranium processing mill, worked as miners or ranchers. As a child, she took an interest in the area’s endless land disputes between cattle ranchers and sheep herders, and between the federal government and both ranchers and miners.

“From a very early age, I was really fascinated by how where you’re born determines so much about you,” she said. “I found it fascinating the way that people fought over land, and how land made such a difference in what happened in peoples’ lives.”

When she turned 12, her mother tasked her with cooking for her four siblings in exchange for dish-washing duty. Nearing high school graduation in 1974, Been expressed an interest in going to college, something her high school guidance counselor dismissed. Fortunately for her, she had sharpened her culinary skills.

She entered a scholarship contest sponsored by a popular pork manufacturer. The contestants gathered at the Brown Palace Hotel in Denver and were taken to a supermarket to buy their ingredients. “I had never been in a supermarket,” she said, recalling her shock at seeing options beyond iceberg lettuce. “I was so naive. But I won.”

Her orange-glazed pork chops, biscuits and jello-ring salad helped pay for her entrance to Colorado State University, where she studied journalism and consumer economics and worked for an attorney who defended student tenants against landlord disputes.

“I really wanted to be Ralph Nader. That was my dream,” she said.

She came to Manhattan for an internship with Consumer Reports Magazine and lived in the Webster Apartments for women on 34th Street and 9th Avenue. During her first walk to Grand Central Station, she was taken by the quick transformation from streets lined with prostitutes and sex shops to gleaming homes owned by the city’s elite.

Been, who later went to New York University School of Law, likened Colorado’s property feuds between sheep and cattle ranchers to the land-use disputes she encountered as commissioner.

“It’s exactly the same fight: People who want to protect what they have,” she said.

Been was most visible during the contentious push to require more below-market-rate housing from developers benefiting from city rezonings. The regulatory change, known as Mandatory Inclusionary Housing, was coupled with a complex rewriting of the city’s 1961 zoning code to eliminate roadblocks to residential development.

Both measures cleared a City Council vote last March, after months of pushback from community boards, borough presidents and housing advocates who feared any acceleration of market-rate development through a rezoning would speed up gentrification.

During a Council hearing last February, as lawmakers criticized the plans, Been pointedly argued for fewer parking lots and taller buildings with elevators to provide more housing for low-income seniors.

“I unfortunately lost my parents very early, but I feel very passionately about this because I have to look seniors in the eye and say to them, ‘I’m sorry; we have a wait list of seven years. That’s probably longer than you’re going to be alive,’” she told one councilman.

Developers, housing experts and politicians often describe Been as hard-working and earnest, someone who avoids the spotlight and sweats the details. After many people in the audience had cleared out of a 13-hour public hearing on the city’s housing plans last year, Been remained in a back row taking notes.

Nevertheless, Been has found herself in the middle of several high-profile political fights.

Housing advocates and longtime residents of poor areas have persistently and loudly protested the mayor’s housing plan, arguing it accelerates gentrification in an economically stratified city.

In the interview Monday, Been defended mixed-income apartment buildings, in which city subsidies and profits from market-rate units cover the cost of housing for low-income tenants.

“I think they’re a lot stronger. The finances for the long-run work out,” she said. “I get very nervous both from, frankly, a legal point of view and a practical point of view when people want there to be sort of exclusively very low-income housing.”

She also fought with Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s administration over proposed changes to a process by which the state grants municipalities the right to issue federally tax-exempt bonds for housing projects. The dispute was part of a longstanding feud between the mayor and governor.

“The challenge was dealing with the personalities, the personalities on the second floor and the way in which they were able to put up roadblocks,” she said, referring to governor’s central staff.

Been described a cohesive team among housing and land use commissioners within the de Blasio administration. But she indicated some disconnect with City Hall, where power has been entrusted to a small cadre of close mayoral advisers.

“Because so many of the folks at City Hall had never been in an agency, I think there was a certain amount of — I’m not sure if I would call it distrust. But there was a certain (belief that) the agencies will be bureaucratic and stand in our way … as opposed to the way we regard ourselves. You know, we’re doing everything we can, but we also are trying not to be crisis-driven,” she said.

Been said she met every few weeks with a handful of other commissioners in related agencies to compare notes.

“We did some amount of bitching about the centralized City Hall, but mostly I think we all felt very much on the same team,” she said.

In her own shop, Been said she prioritized smoothing out a notoriously bureaucratic set of processes for closing deals. She made mundane changes, like simplifying the architectural review process to trim down application times, and more ideological ones, such as prohibiting developers who receive city subsidies from rejecting applicants based on credit scores.

The agency came under some scrutiny for a series of longstanding problems with its enforcement of rules tied to the 421-a property tax break. City officials have recently announced fixes to those issues.

In her job at the Furman Center, where she worked before coming to City Hall, Been said she intends to focus on issues of particular significance as President-elect Donald Trump takes office. Like the mayor, she expressed concern about potential cuts to federal subsidies and less lucrative housing tax credits in the coming years with Trump in the White House.

“My outgoing message, I guess, to people is same as the message I’ve had for some time: We need to just get things done and not be piddling around with, ‘Is this perfect?’” she said. “We need to just get it done because we don’t know what’s coming.”

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story misstated the number of new apartments financed and preserved under Been. The housing agency has closed financing on 20,854 new apartments and preserved 41,652.