Earlier this week, we took another big step forward in the Obama Administration’s efforts to encourage more sustainable development as we announced $100 million for our new Sustainable Communities Regional Planning Grant program to encourage regions to integrate economic development, land use, and transportation investments – which will help to tie the quality and location of housing to broader opportunities such as access to good jobs, quality schools, and safe streets.
For all the implications of “sprawl”—from job loss, economic decline and segregation, to obesity, asthma rates, to climate change and our dangerous dependence on foreign oil—all of them share by one fundamental problem: the mismatch between where we live and where we work. Whatever else we do to address these problems, America must find a way to connect housing to jobs.
And Americans are demanding it. Today, the average household spends more than half of its budget on housing and transportation. They have become American families’ two single biggest expenses.
During the housing boom, real estate agents suggested to families that couldn’t afford to live near job centers that they could find a more affordable home by living farther away. Lenders bought into the “Drive to Qualify” myth as well – giving easy credit to homebuyers without accounting for how much it might cost families to live in these areas or the risk they could pose to the market.
And then, an odd thing happened when these families moved in – they found themselves driving dozens of miles to work, to school, to the movies, to the grocery store, spending hours in traffic and spending nearly as much to fill their gas tank as they were to pay their mortgage...and in some places, more. In addition to adding to families’ budgets and time, it is also contributing to increased carbon emissions and pollution.
In all, in the last century, transportation costs as a share of household expenditures have increased by a thousand percent.
In February, HUD launched our new Office of Sustainable Housing and Communities – allowing us to work directly with communities to support innovative planning and practice at the local level and helping to coordinate our investments with other agencies at the federal level.
In particular, HUD formed a Sustainability Partnership with the Department of Transportation and the Environmental Protection Agency. When it comes to housing, environmental and transportation policy, the Federal government must speak with one voice. This is an example of how we’re changing the way we do business across the Administration – working not at cross purposes in our silos, but together, in common purpose
Of course, as critical as regional planning is, the hard work of implementing plans happens at the local level.
That’s why our $40 million Sustainable Communities Challenge Planning Grant program is targeted to cities and towns. I announced this program earlier this week in conjunction with Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood in a joint grant program that includes up to $35 million for its “TIGER II” planning grant program.
Where the Transportation program will fund planning activities that relate directly to a future transportation capital investment, HUD’s program will fund land-use related planning activities and affordable housing strategies that will be linked to that investment. This funding will make it possible for communities to hire staff with the expertise needed to remove barriers communities face to sustainable development.
The goal of each of these efforts—at the regional level, at the community level and at the neighborhood level—is the same: to advance our shared priorities and values as Americans for the decades to come.
Priorities like jobs for the 21st century – located closer to where we live, so businesses spend less money moving goods and services and people can spend less time commuting and more time with family.
Values like healthier, more inclusive communities – with neighborhoods where kids can play outside and breathe clean air.
Communities where opportunities for people of all ages, incomes, races and ethnicities are never determined by their zip code.
These are the kinds of communities we all want our children to grow up in.
If, in this new century, we grow our communities and our economies out of this fundamental principle, then I have no doubt our America and our children’s America will be a strong, prosperous America infused with the same sense of purpose, opportunity and resolve that have always defined us.
Shaun Donovan is the Secrecretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development
UCLA students help high schoolers build skills, feel empowered and beautify community.
For a group of high school students in Inglewood, a community gardening project began with picking up debris: bags, bottle caps, a sprouting potato and crack pipes.
Launched by students under the leadership of D’Artagnan Scorza, a graduate student in education, the project aims to cultivate not only the city’s first community garden, but also a sense of civic engagement and empowerment.
Once a week, Scorza and two of his UCLA classmates, Lorna Apper, a graduate student in geography and Erick Sanchez de Leon, a UCLA alumnus, drive down to teach the students everything from soil composition and water drainage to shoveling basics.
Although the weekly sessions have only gone on for five weeks, the initial idea came a year earlier. Scorza’s students in his group, the Black Male Youth Academy at Morningside High School, decided they wanted to beautify their community, Scorza said.
Since then, Scorza reached out to the local government and the Inglewood Unified School District, which allowed the group to use the district’s unused property across the street from the school’s field.
“By and large, it’s already been a success, but we’re going to see a significant success when this place is full of vegetables, fruits, trees and flowers,” said Scorza, who served as a student representative for the UC Board of Regents until 2009.
The lot right now is a growing pile of gravel, an unused well and a few patches of weeds, but the students’ dreams are big. They want to see fruit trees, sunflowers, a gravel pathway and vegetables, and eventually a farmer’s market.
For a school where nearly 80 percent of the students receive free or reduced meals and fast food chains circle the campus, the chance to grow their own food has been empowering, said English teacher Rashondra Woods, who joins her students in the weeding and digging.
“(The class) can actually see that they have the opportunity to understand that an idea sparks action and they see the result. Hopefully, they’ll see by May and June the flowers and seeds blossoming,” she said.
Although Scorza, Sanchez de Leon and Apper have pointed the students to local resources, the project is run by the students.
One of the students is Kevin Crawford, a ninth-grader at Morningside High School, who appointed himself the seed collector. As the class saves seeds from beans or fruits they have eaten, he is in charge of counting and storing them.
“It might sound boring, but it’s kind of cool because I get to count seeds when I’m bored,” said Crawford, who is learning to start a garden for the first time. “Let’s just say, (gardening) is not as easy as they make it look on TV.”
Aside from over 150 seeds collected, much of the supplies have come from the students, friends, such as Apper’s mother and neighbors.
After a city council member, Ralph Franklin, saw the students working on their first day, he rushed back with shovels, gloves and a $200 check.
Neighbors have started noticing and helping, too. Sanchez de Leon and Apper have answered the questions of curious neighbors, who are now donating their trash for the garden’s compost.
The school’s assistant principal, Joyce Rushing, is excited to see the project coming together.
“The people in this community are hungry for fresh vegetables and fruits,” she said. “And I’m really happy to see the children involved in something that’s really positive for them.”
From the partnerships Scorza has fostered with the district, school board, local government and UCLA groups, the team hopes to involve more groups in the project to help design and implement new elements for their garden, like a solar panel water pump.
The students have applied for a $25,000 grant as a part of Pepsi’s Refresh Everything, a program that allows people to vote for a community project to win money from the corporation.
To promote their project, they have made YouTube videos of their progress and will soon be completing a painted sign.
But for now, the 30 students’ homework assignment is to take care of a pea. Each student took a cup filled with soil from the lot with a seed, which they will have to water everyday.
“(My parents) are going to trip out about (the peas in the house),” said Javier Ortega, a high school senior. “But they’re going to have to deal with that to support nature. If I don’t, who else is?”
What does your lifestyle consist of? Would you rather walk to the local grocery store or do you find yourself driving even though it’s a ten minute walk? Welcome to the life of Jeff Heie where he and his family transitioned into the minimalist, greener world of sourcing their energy locally. For the Heie family, a simple walk, or even a couple of trips to purchase fresh foods has become routine. After packing their belongings, of only necessary value, the Heie’s moved from their comfortable space in Arizona to a small town just outside Manchester, England.
According to Jefff, “Every place in the world has local sources of renewable energy, whether it [is] the sun, the wind, hydroelectric, geothermal or tidal power.” The Heie’s felt it essential to utilize these natural “sources” in order to provide a healthy planet for their children and future generations to come. Phasing out fossil fuel and using renewable energy translates to a happier and sustainable life. For them, renting a car once a month means they can get chores done or spend the weekend vacationing. Bicycling and walking, versus driving, means more family time, more exercise and conserving energy.
It is a cyclical process- from the way you use resources, use transportation, from the way you eat and interact with your community, it all affects the world we live in. Jeff highlights how the use of a “milk man” brings a certain familiarity to the neighborhood- a person who gives comfort to the elderly, the children and even raises issues as to how the milk is transported. The local milk man’s vehicle is electric- running on battery. It is astonishing that living locally can be more prosperous than living in a developed nation- a simpler way of living means “reducing carbon food print, prevents military complexes based on the need to protect our economic and political interests, and it is better for our communities to be economically viable and locally self efficient.”
You recognize the nuances of life, meet people, actually offer a smile and exchange a “hello” when you become invested and connected to your community. Understandably, living day-to-day or trying to overcome the exhaustion of long work hours doesn’t afford most the time, or the ability to live unconventionally. We, meaning the U.S., are part of a system that is designed to make our lives more difficult. But if you think about it, if we mirrored the Heie family and put our efforts into living more collectively, we could share Mother Earth and call it our home.
In Richard Florida’s recent piece for the Atlantic, “How the Crash Will Reshape America,” he foresees a more concentrated population centered around cities, leading to the further expansion of mega-regions – systems of multiple cities and their surrounding suburbs – based on their ability to offer higher paying jobs and attract the best talent. Florida views this shift as not only inevitable – loss of jobs forcing people to move where they can find work – but necessary. This geographic clustering he argues, will speed the kind of innovation required to remake our economy into a more resilient and adaptable model. He points us to a study on “urban metabolism” conducted by the Santa Fe Institute:
[W]hen the Santa Fe team examined trends in innovation, patent activity, wages, and GDP, they found that successful cities, unlike biological organisms, actually get faster as they grow. In order to grow bigger and overcome diseconomies of scale like congestion and rising housing and business costs, cities must become more efficient, innovative, and productive. The researchers dubbed the extraordinarily rapid metabolic rate that successful cities are able to achieve “super-linear†scaling. “By almost any measure,†they wrote, “the larger a city’s population, the greater the innovation and wealth creation per person.†Places like New York with finance and media, Los Angeles with film and music, and Silicon Valley with hightech are all examples of high-metabolism places.
But if the future landscape of the U.S. does mean more people in less places, what exactly does that look like and how do we meet the challenges of this reordering? As Florida notes, “We need to ensure that key cities and regions continue to circulate people, goods, and ideas quickly and efficiently.” Much of this touches on ideas about building sustainable communities with smarter infrastructure in place to help facilitate this growth. Not exactly notions that you would expect to be kicking around the halls of Congress – until now perhaps.
On his blog, Fast Lane, Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood has been writing about his desire to create “livable communities”:
[O]ne of my highest priorities is to work closely with Congress, other Federal departments, the nation’s governors, and local officials to help promote more livable communities through sustainable surface transportation programs. By focusing on livability, we can help transform the way transportation serves the American people—and create safer, healthier communities that provide access to economic opportunities.
To that end, LaHood and HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan presented in front of the House of Representatives yesterday, detailing their plans for creating “a high-level inter-agency task force to better coordinate federal transportation and housing investments.” Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised when our government makes intelligent and ultimately transformative choices, but this move comes as bit of a happy shock. Recognizing the larger context and inter-connectedness of housing, transportation, energy consumption and its effect on people is an enlightened first step on the part of our officials. As Secretary LaHood says, “I like an idea that makes sense. This idea makes sense.”
The US Department of Transportation (DOT) is seeking to use stimulus spending to support livable communities, says Beth Osborne, deputy assistant secretary for transportation policy. DOT has $1.5 billion in multimodal discretionary funding from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, Osborne said in a November 9 Internet conference sponsored by the Center for Transportation and the Environment at North Carolina State University. The multimodal funds are also known as TIGER grants.
“When we put together the criteria by which we would evaluate projects, we put livability at the top,” said Osborne. “It’s up there with safety and economic competitiveness. We could not have made a stronger indication about what our priorities are.”
What does DOT mean by livability? Osborne’s description focused on mixed use, walkable neighborhoods, and pedestrian access to transit, jobs, stores, schools, and other public buildings. The following is Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood’s definition, according to Osborne: “Livability means a community where you can take kids to school, go to work, see a doctor, go to the grocery store, have dinner and a movie, and play with your kids in a park, all without having to get into a car.”
A “major priority” at DOT will be to focus the discretionary funds on communities that seek to improve livability, Osborne said. “There’s a real bottom line need to reward those communities that make those connections,” she said.
The subject of the web conference was the Partnership for Sustainable Communities that was formed earlier this year in collaboration involving DOT, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), and the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Also speaking were Shelley Poticha, senior adviser for sustainable housing and communities at HUD, John Frece, smart growth program director at EPA, and Elizabeth Wilkins, White House policy assistant for urban affairs and mobility and opportunity.
HUD’s 2010 budget calls for $100 million for sustainable communities planning grants, Poticha noted. The budget also requests $40 million for community challenge grants that could be used for zoning reform and other implementation tools for smart growth. Both programs could be authorized by the end of 2009 or early in 2010, Poticha said. After that, detailed criteria for these grants will be announced.
Foreclosures higher in suburbs
Poticha added that HUD research shows that foreclosures have been highest in neighborhoods that lack key aspects of livability. “Our research has shown a remarkable alignment between the neighborhoods that Beth described as places where every trip has to be made by car and the concentration of the greatest number of foreclosures in the housing markets,” she said. “That might be a coincidence but we are not so sure — because we have looked at almost every metro region in the country and found this same pattern.”
Consequently, she said, “We see the sustainable communities partnership as key to getting communities back on their feet after the economic collapse.”
Other highlights:
• Frece estimated that if the US shifted just 10 percent of new housing starts to smarter growth development over the next 10 years, Americans would save about 5 billion gallons of gasoline and about $220 billion in household transportation expenses.
• Osborne reported that Envision Utah, a smart growth regional plan led by Calthorpe Associates, reduced infrastructure costs by $4.5 billion over a 10-year period in the Salt Lake City area while cutting traffic congestion.
The US Department of Transportation (DOT) is seeking to use stimulus spending to support livable communities, says Beth Osborne, deputy assistant secretary for transportation policy. DOT has $1.5 billion in multimodal discretionary funding from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, Osborne said in a November 9 Internet conference sponsored by the Center for Transportation and the Environment at North Carolina State University. The multimodal funds are also known as TIGER grants.
“When we put together the criteria by which we would evaluate projects, we put livability at the top,” said Osborne. “It’s up there with safety and economic competitiveness. We could not have made a stronger indication about what our priorities are.”
What does DOT mean by livability? Osborne’s description focused on mixed use, walkable neighborhoods, and pedestrian access to transit, jobs, stores, schools, and other public buildings. The following is Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood’s definition, according to Osborne: “Livability means a community where you can take kids to school, go to work, see a doctor, go to the grocery store, have dinner and a movie, and play with your kids in a park, all without having to get into a car.”
A “major priority” at DOT will be to focus the discretionary funds on communities that seek to improve livability, Osborne said. “There’s a real bottom line need to reward those communities that make those connections,” she said.
The subject of the web conference was the Partnership for Sustainable Communities that was formed earlier this year in collaboration involving DOT, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), and the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Also speaking were Shelley Poticha, senior adviser for sustainable housing and communities at HUD, John Frece, smart growth program director at EPA, and Elizabeth Wilkins, White House policy assistant for urban affairs and mobility and opportunity.
HUD’s 2010 budget calls for $100 million for sustainable communities planning grants, Poticha noted. The budget also requests $40 million for community challenge grants that could be used for zoning reform and other implementation tools for smart growth. Both programs could be authorized by the end of 2009 or early in 2010, Poticha said. After that, detailed criteria for these grants will be announced.
Foreclosures higher in suburbs
Poticha added that HUD research shows that foreclosures have been highest in neighborhoods that lack key aspects of livability. “Our research has shown a remarkable alignment between the neighborhoods that Beth described as places where every trip has to be made by car and the concentration of the greatest number of foreclosures in the housing markets,” she said. “That might be a coincidence but we are not so sure — because we have looked at almost every metro region in the country and found this same pattern.”
Consequently, she said, “We see the sustainable communities partnership as key to getting communities back on their feet after the economic collapse.”
Other highlights:
• Frece estimated that if the US shifted just 10 percent of new housing starts to smarter growth development over the next 10 years, Americans would save about 5 billion gallons of gasoline and about $220 billion in household transportation expenses.
• Osborne reported that Envision Utah, a smart growth regional plan led by Calthorpe Associates, reduced infrastructure costs by $4.5 billion over a 10-year period in the Salt Lake City area while cutting traffic congestion.
