The Urban Team

I have a very good friend named Sean Donovan (not spelled the same as new incoming HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan but a sound-alike), so it's been enough of a tickle seeing Barack Obama saying things like "Shaun Donovan will bring fresh thinking unencumbered by old ideology and outdated ideas." that I haven't really looked into Donovan's policies. Call it a personal failing. But Donovan, the former New York City housing commissioner, looks like a good choice. New York over the past decade has been a place with lots of money and the wherewithal to experiment, and Donovan has gotten results.

Obama praised Donovan's record at the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development, where he managed a $7.5 billion plan that put a half million New Yorkers in affordable housing. The Harvard-educated architect also kept foreclosures away from New York's low- and moderate-income home ownership plan, with just five foreclosures out of 17,000 participating homes.

What's more, Donovan foresaw the housing crisis and made preventing foreclosures a top priority of his department.

In the middle of 2004, I sat down with Donovan (I was at Newsday at the time) for a chat about Mayor Michael Bloomberg's initiative to tackle the shortage of low- and middle-income housing in the city.

To my surprise, Donovan brushed aside my questions about the city's initiatives and began talking at length about the coming "flood" of foreclosures he anticipated among highly leveraged apartment buildings purchased by recent immigrants -- and a looming subprime crisis for one- and two-family homeowners in up-and-coming neighborhoods in southeast Queens and central Brooklyn.

I left the meeting a little shaken: At the time housing prices in previously depressed parts of the city were booming and the city had been able to sell off almost of all its once-massive stock of foreclosed properties to private owners and investors. The future looked bright to almost everyone -- but not to Donovan, who was planning for the looming disaster.

Maybe this is someone who understands that homeownership is not a virtue on its own, without the necessary safeguards to sustain it.

Meanwhile, Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrion will head up a new Department of Urban Affairs. I'm not sure why that couldn't have been incorporated as a division under HUD, but the fact that Donovan and Carrion probably worked together on a multitide of issues means that they may be able to manage any turf wars. Urban policy is going to be crucially important over the next term - urban areas will be the recipient of lots of infrastructure spending, and the recession will impact urban areas in a pronounced fashion. I would like to see resources put toward creating more walkable and livable cities, with smart growth, green jobs and lots of transit. There are a lot of good ideas for urban policy here. In this case, having a President who spent most of his collegiate and post-college days living in urban environments and working on these issues is undeniably an asset.

...incidentally, the Sean Donovan I know has a very cool art blog focused on exhibits in and around the San Francisco Bay Area. Not a cabinet-level post, mind you, but worth a read.