HUD, DOT Teaming Up to Promote Sustainable Communities
The federal government isn’t really set up, institutionally, to think in a comprehensive way about how transportation and land use issues fit together and determine the kind of communities we live in. Fortunately, officials who are attuned to the problem can find ways to cope with it. Thus, today came the welcome announcement that the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Department of Transportation will be teaming up to do interagency policy on sustainable communities. Some choice slices from the HUD release:
DOT and HUD have created a high-level interagency task force to better coordinate federal transportation and housing investments and identify strategies to give American families:
* More choices for affordable housing near employment opportunities;
* More transportation options, to lower transportation costs, shorten travel times, and improve the environment; and
* Safe, livable, healthy communities.[...]
The task force will set a goal to have every major metropolitan area in the country conduct integrated housing, transportation, and land use planning and investment in the next four years. To facilitate integrated planning, HUD and DOT seek, through HUD’s proposed Sustainable Communities Initiative which it will administer in consultation with DOT, to make planning grants available to metropolitan areas, and create mechanisms to ensure those plans are carried through to localities. DOT will encourage Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs) to conduct this integrated planning as a part of their next long-range transportation plan update and will provide technical assistance on scenario planning, a tool for assessing future growth alternatives that better coordinate land use, and transportation planning.
This is all very good stuff. Of course to an extent these are inherently local issues and not much progress can be made unless state and local officials are willing to see beyond ever-wider highways and ever-further-away new exurban developments. But for the past several years a number of jurisdictions who’ve had good ideas have found themselves stymied by a hostile federal government. Now we’re looking at a the reverse—a federal government that’s trying, as best it can, to actually encourage best-practices and lay the foundation for sustainable economic growth.
20 Responses to “HUD, DOT Teaming Up to Promote Sustainable Communities”
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March 18th, 2009 at 6:01 pm
Make sure that it has plenty of runways and access roads:
http://buzz.yahoo.com/buzzlog/92384
hee hee. Another social engineer with a liberal arts degree sees his dream undone by the march of technology.
We engineers enjoy that.
March 18th, 2009 at 6:01 pm
Correction: We real engineers –with real degrees –enjoy that.
March 18th, 2009 at 6:03 pm
“More choices for affordable housing…..”
Sounds like a job for Fannie & Freddie.
March 18th, 2009 at 6:20 pm
I love how “sustainable” is now just a word for “something liberals like.” Just like “fascist” means “something liberals don’t like.” My neighborhood is not really Matt’s platonic ideal (i.e. living in a 500 sqft apt and taking the bus to work), but it’s not going to go anywhere either. Stop corrupting the language.
Liberal 1: “MMmm.. this top shelf margarita is really sustainable.”
Liberal 2: “I’m glad you’re enjoying yours, because my beer is fascist.”
March 18th, 2009 at 6:29 pm
A day without Mixner-bait just isn’t worth living, huh Matt?
March 18th, 2009 at 6:50 pm
Stop corrupting the language.
That’s a nice reverse Godwin. Here’s a primer:
Dust Bowl: unsustainable, not fascist.
McMansion suburbs in the middle of a desert: unsustainable, not fascist.
Hitler: fascist, thankfully also unsustainable.
Michael Ledeen: fascist, somehow sustainable.
Smarter fucking trolls, please.
March 18th, 2009 at 8:04 pm
Awesome news. Planners have been screaming about the land use/transportation connection – the fact that transportation choices need to be made with an understanding of their impact on development patterns, and should work to promote or at least not undermine other planning and development goals – for years.
And what makes it that much more awesome is that this breakthrough comes in a year when the fanatical ideologues who can’t understand transportation and land use policy as anything but a front in their decades-stale kultukampf just don’t matter in our political life.
March 18th, 2009 at 11:13 pm
Before Matt gets too excited….
More choices for affordable housing near employment opportunities;
Most employment opportunities are in suburbs. Among other things, this is likely to mean higher subsidies for housing around suburban employment centers such as shopping malls, office parks, factories, hospitals, etc.
More transportation options, to lower transportation costs, shorten travel times, and improve the environment;
Since cars are so much faster than transit, one of the most effective ways of shortening travel times and increasing transportation options would be to make owning and operating cars more affordable who currently have to rely on transit. And also shifting transit services themselves towards more personalized, taxi-like, demand-response paratransit and away from conventional buses and trains.
March 18th, 2009 at 11:18 pm
McMansion suburbs in the middle of a desert: unsustainable
Maybe if you keep repeating this nonsense enough times you’ll somehow make it true. You never know.
March 18th, 2009 at 11:35 pm
…Mixner bait…
Maybe if you keep repeating this nonsense enough times you’ll somehow make it true.
…and we have a winner!
March 19th, 2009 at 4:16 am
How did HUD’s promotion of “affordable housing” work out?
Generally speaking, if HUD says it’s trying to do X, you can be assured that Anti-X will happen. So, if HUD is trying to head off global warming, it would be a good time to buy real estate in Antarctica.
March 19th, 2009 at 5:17 am
Maybe if Mixner keeps trolling and Sailer keeps burning crosses for the next 50 years, I’ll finally give a dog’s arse what they think or say.
Ah, no.
March 19th, 2009 at 8:50 am
And what makes it that much more awesome is that this breakthrough comes in a year when the fanatical ideologues who can’t understand transportation and land use policy as anything but a front in their decades-stale kultukampf just don’t matter in our political life.
Oh, hai guyz.
March 19th, 2009 at 12:28 pm
Shaun Donovan was such an awesome choice. The HUD slot is so often used as either a patronage position, a diversity slot, or for political outreach to a particular urban political machine. It’s great to see such a visionary policy guy put there. It demonstrates not only that Obama takes urban development and sprawl issues seriously, but also that he is on the right side of the issues.
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April 9th, 2009 at 10:27 am
If you ever want to see a reader’s feedback
, I rate this article for four from five. Detailed info, but I have to go to that damn yahoo to find the missed pieces. Thanks, anyway!