HUD secretary wants to end sprawl

Secretary Shaun Donovan

Vilas Bhuchar, May 25, 10.

“It’s time the federal government stopped encouraging sprawl,” Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Shaun Donovan declared to a gathering of the Congress for the New Urbanism last Friday morning, according to Fast Company.

Donovan said the federal government has encouraged people to move into the suburbs without considering the high costs of transportation for decades, notes the story:

“For decades,” Donovan said, “the government encouraged sprawl” with freeway construction and a “housing finance system that perpetuated the ‘drive until you qualify’ myth.

“We learned from the housing crisis that home ownership is not for everyone,” he said, but “transportation patterns can push families over the edge. The average family spends half their household budget on housing and transportation—they have become the two biggest expenditures. Lenders bought into the “drive to qualify” myth as well, not accounting for the costs to buy into these [exurban] areas. Families found themselves driving dozens of miles to work, to buy groceries, to move theaters, spending nearly as much to fill their gas tanks as to pay for their mortgages, in some cases even more.”

Moving forward, Donovan announced HUD would fund $3 billion worth of projects this year alone, taking into account “location efficiency” metrics, such as transportation access, residential density, and the criteria of LEED-ND, which applies the green principles of LEED to urban development, adds the story.

Donovan emphasized that the government’s changing stance, which includes $100 million in sustainable development grants for cities, another $40 million grant targeted at local communities, and “TIGER II,” $600 million in competitive transportation grants that follows last year’s TIGER I, places power in the people’s hands, not the government’s, notes the story:

“This is not about the federal government telling communities what they need to look like—we tried that before,” he added, alluding to the disastrous “urban renewal” policies of the 1960s. “This is people voting with their feet, as they want to move to communities with more transportation options. The President understands this, and place is clearly part of this discussion in a way it hasn’t been before.” The New Urbanists understood this before anyone else, he told them. “Our challenge is to bring that holistic view into the mainstream,” and to “take it to scale.”

Finally, HUD is also spending $10 million to create metrics that would more accurately show the combined cost of housing and transportation so that underwriters better understand the benefits of lending towards New Urbanism projects, concludes the story.

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