Feds pursue NU agenda with more funds and holistic policies
Secretary Shaun Donovan electrified the Congress for New Urbanism’s annual gathering in May by announcing that the US Department of Housing & Urban Development will use location efficiency to score grant applications and will use the LEED-ND rating system to bring more walkable, mixed use neighborhoods into existence.
“It’s time that federal dollars stopped encouraging sprawl and started lowering the barriers to the kind of sustainable development our country needs,” Donovan told an enthusiastic crowd that assembled in Atlanta for CNU’s 18th congress. Even coming from an Obama administration known to look favorably on compact development, Donovan’s speech struck new urbanists as a breakthrough. The congress attracted 1,400 people from North America and abroad.
The secretary, who previously led New York City’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development, criticized the “drive to qualify” mode of thinking, which for decades encouraged families to move to new, lower-density locations far from city centers. “We’ve learned from foreclosure patterns that hidden costs like transportation can put families over the edge into increased financial vulnerability,” he said.
Donovan outlined the following ways in which the Obama administration will help states and localities nurture smart growth:
• A $100 million Sustainable Communities Planning Grant program, announced last year, is now being prepared under the guidance of former CNU Executive Director Shelley Poticha. Donovan said the notice of funds availability would be issued in “coming weeks.” The program will “encourage metropolitan and rural regions to plan for the integration of economic development, land use, and transportation investments.” Regions will be able to “realize their own visions” and achieve “outcomes like less time commuting and more time with family and neighborhoods,” Donovan said.
• A $40 million Community Challenge Planning Grant program is also being prepared now. It will help communities to develop master plans and initiate zoning and building code reforms, including inclusionary zoning ordinances and corridor and district plans. Strategies aided by the grants may include land acquisition aimed at creating places that are walkable, mixed use, and transit-oriented, and have affordable housing.
• As part of the Department of Transportation’s upcoming $600 million TIGER II grant program, HUD will distribute $35 million to support land-use-related planning activities that prepare the way for transit investment. Needed modernization of building codes and zoning laws is a major purpose of the $35 million program. The grants will be coordinated with the Community Challenge Planning Grants — thus harmonizing transportation planning and land use planning, as has long been advocated in smart growth circles. The overall $600 million in competitive multimodal grants is for improving the nation’s infrastructure, including highways, bridges, ports, passenger rail, and freight rail. TIGER II will be similar but not identical to the original TIGER grants, awarded in February, a program that included funding for streetcar systems, multimodal facilities, and “complete streets” retrofits.
The rating system of the LEED-ND (Neighborhood Development) program will be a factor in HUD’s overall grant-making, which totals $3.25 billion per year. LEED-ND ensures that developments not only incorporate resource-conserving construction but also reduce people’s dependence on automobiles.
Location-efficient goes mainstream
“Location-efficient” mortgages, promoted by the Chicago-based Center for Neighborhood Technology, have allowed some homebuyers to qualify for larger loans when the properties are in walkable or transit-served locations. Thanks to the new initiative announced by Donovan, location efficiency will become a mainstream practice.
The Federal Housing Administration has already instituted changes that “expand our ability to do infill development and recycle polluted land near transit,” Donovan added. ”We’re making headway promoting mixed use financing as well.”
Embracing the principles of the HOPE VI public housing redevelopment program, which was cut back during the Bush administration, HUD is working with Congress on a Transforming Rental Assistance initiative. The initiative would preserve affordable housing on public housing sites “but also allow for additional incomes and uses, including commercial, recreational, and transit-oriented development,” Donovan explained.
HUD’s announcements were hailed by CNU Board Chair Victor Dover, who said they will make cities “more practical for day-to-day living, more durable, more valuable, more self-reliant, and integral to the global environmental solution.”
While praising compact, mixed use, and transit-oriented development, Donovan took pains to say that federal agencies will not dictate how communities and regions develop. Nonetheless, the intention is to steer federal funds toward patterns associated with smart growth.
In February HUD established an Office of Sustainable Housing and Communities and put Poticha in charge of it. HUD, the Department of Transportation, and the Environmental Protection Agency are collaborating far more than they have in the past. “The federal government must speak with one voice,” Donovan asserted.
“We are actually sitting in the same room and making funding decisions jointly,” he noted, citing federal grants for Detroit as an example. In the first round of the TIGER grant program, DOT awarded $25 million to the Woodward Avenue streetcar project, which is expected to mesh with community development activities in the Woodward corridor and with brownfield remediation.
Donovan’s presentation was in some ways reminiscent of an address that President Bill Clinton’s HUD secretary, Henry Cisneros, gave to a CNU congress in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1996. In both instances, CNU members gave the HUD secretary a standing ovation — though a few skeptics wondered in 1996 about the wisdom of allying New Urbanism with a federal agency that many considered dysfunctional.
There were two notable differences between the 1996 HUD address and the one this year. First, HUD has bolstered its reputation, thanks to many successful HOPE VI undertakings in the intervening 14 years. Second, Donovan displayed a much sharper understanding of how and why compact urban mixed use neighborhoods are more beneficial than low-density, automobile-dependent, single-use development. The sense in Atlanta was that Donovan and the Obama administration have truly grasped the rationale for smart growth and New Urbanism, and are ready to support these integrated development patterns with a significant degree of coordination.
