By Bendix Anderson
Once a distressed public
housing site, the nearly 1,700 densely developed new residences at High Point
are close to mass transit, employers, and services. They are also energy
efficient and affordable to people earning a mix of incomes. The project earned
a 2007 National Award for Smart Growth for the U.S. Environmental Protection
Agency (EPA).
High Point could be a
model of things to come, according to Ron Sims, former King County Executive
and a local official who championed the redevelopment of High Point. In the
spring, Sims took a new job in Washington, D.C., where he joins a growing set
of experts in the administration of President Barack Obama pledging to support—and
focus federal funding on—a more efficient kind of development.
Obama and his
Administration’s commitment to sustainable development represents a sea change
in the nation’s dialogue on planning for development, according to groups
ranging from the Urban Land Institute to the American Planning Association. In
June, three major federal agencies—Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the
Department of Transportation (DOT) and the EPA—announced their Partnership for
Sustainable Communities along with six guiding “livability principles” that
will coordinate federal transportation, environmental protection, and housing
investments at the agencies (see sidebar).
Promises, Promises
“We need to
fundamentally change the way we look at metropolitan development," said
President Obama at a roundtable on metropolitan policy on July 13. "For
too long, federal policy has actually encouraged sprawl and congestion and
pollution, rather than quality public transportation and smart, sustainable
development. And we've been keeping communities isolated when we should
have been bringing them together.”
“HUD can help develop
communities that are livable, walkable and sustainable,” said HUD Secretary
Shaun Donovan at his Senate confirmation hearing. “By joining up transportation
and housing, HUD can give families the choice to live closer to where they work
and, in the process, cut transportation costs.”
“We are going to have to
densify and locate jobs much closer to where people are living,” says HUD
Deputy Secretary Ron Sims, who has explicitly addressed the need to build housing
at greater densities than the one-dwelling-unit-per-acre maximum allowed by the
zoning codes of many towns and suburban “villages.” “We cannot continue to
build out America,” said Sims, who is in charge of HUD's Office of
Sustainability.
Money on the Table
The Obama Administration
is pledging to put funding behind its sustainable development promises, and
huge amounts of money could be involved. The Administration’s proposed budget
for fiscal year 2010 included $73.2 billion for DOT, $46.3 billion for HUD, and
$10.5 billion for the EPA. Members of the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban
Affairs committee reportedly support even more funding.
Changes in formulas used
to set federal funding levels could have tremendous implications. For example,
by promising to promote “transportation choices” that reduce our “dependence on
foreign oil,” DOT Secretary Ray LaHood is effectively promising to shift his
agency’s focus away from cars and highways. In recent years, about 85 percent
of DOT’s spending has supported highways, with only 15 percent going to mass
transit projects.
New mass transit
projects would create opportunities for transit-oriented development,
potentially including significant affordable housing, according to housing
advocates like Bill Kelly, president of Stewards for Affordable Housing for the
Future.
However, old ways dies
hard in Washington. Powerful interest groups, from the American Trucking
Association to the American Road and Transportation Builders Association to the
American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, are deeply
invested in the business of building highways. Some of these groups may
initially oppose changes to DOT’s budget, even though some of their members may
eventually benefit from increased spending on mass transit.
“The people that benefit
from the status quo will fight to keep it,” says Tom Murphy, senior resident
fellow at the Urban Land Institute. “The people that will benefit from the new
order aren’t clear how it will benefit them.”
Advocates for the status
quo have already won the first round of the contest: infrastructure funding in
the $787,000 billion stimulus bill passed earlier this year largely followed
the standard division between highway spending and mass transit spending as the
Administration sacrificed a full discussion of Smart Growth priorities in favor
of getting the bill quickly through Congress.
“It was a
disappointment,” says Murphy.
With health care, reform
of the financial system, and the war in Afghanistan—among other things—crowding
the top of the federal to-do list, it’s unclear if the Administration plans to
fight hard to renegotiate agency budgets. In June, DOT postponed a planned
five-year reauthorization of the Highway Trust Fund until at least late 2010 to
provide “Congress the time it needs to fully deliberate the direction of
America’s transportation priorities,” says LaHood.
Competitive Funding
No matter what happens
in Congress, officials can funnel large amounts of funding to sustainable
development. To do that, agencies like HUD will rely on point-scored
competitions to put its livability principles into practice, says Sims.
Sims proposes that HUD
score applications for funding based on attributes such as the carbon emissions
the development would create, including emissions associated with
transportation. Also, when HUD scores the affordability of planned housing
projects, the agency could include the likely cost of transportation for the
residents as part of the cost of the housing. Health outcomes could also become
a part of the way in which funding applications are scored.
“The built environment
is incredibly important to health outcomes,” says Sims, referring to a study by
the University of Washington that links pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods to increased
physical activity and better health. “We can predict morbidity by zip code,” he
says.
The federal Partnership
for Sustainable Communities plans to reward local governments that plan for
sustainable development through federal programs, for example, federal funding
for metropolitan planning organizations. “If you want a lot of DOT money, you
are going to plan differently,” says Sims. “If you want HUD money you are going
to have to plan differently.”
The kind of planning HUD
would reward would follow the federal Partnership’s livability principles, says
Sims. He envisions the federal government offering a “toolkit” of potential
planning tools to local governments, ranging from variable tolling on highways
depending on the distance traveled to modified zoning requirements. Local
governments would be able to take or leave these planning tools based on their
area’s needs and the funding programs they wish to access.
“We would be a partner
rather than a regulatory agency,” he says. “We deal with the willing, and a
number of them are there. They are lining up.”
Coordination between
government agencies and existing programs has increased the effectiveness of
government programs in the past, according to Sims. For example, in 2002, the
U.S. Interagency Council of Homelessness announced a plan to coordinate
existing homeless prevention programs in a bold plan to end chronic
homelessness in 10 years—with just $35 million of its own new federal funding.
Many homeless advocates were incredulous at first. But in the next few years,
more than 300 towns and counties around the nation worked with the Council to
create local plans to end chronic homelessness by bringing officials and
existing programs together. Though short-term, economic homelessness continues
to rise, several cities now report falling numbers in the numbers of people
that have been out on the streets for years.
“You don’t always have
to create new money to get things done,” says Sims. “You use existing money.
Everyone is now synchronizing their programs.”
HUD also plans to
release information on the costs of energy and transportation associated with
housing across the county as an affordability index that mortgage lenders and
homebuyers can use in making decisions about how large a mortgage loan should
be or how much house a family can afford. The index will encourage the private
housing market to take sustainability into account.
Developers who build
affordable housing are carefully tracking the pronouncements coming from
Washington. For many, the new federal principles already match Smart Growth
business plans based around infill housing that they have adopted over the last
5 to 10 years.
“We already do this—these
are among our core principals,” says Mark Holmes, vice president of portfolio
management for Mercy Housing. The federal principals are good news to Holmes:
new coordination among agencies could help developers finance projects with
funding from a variety of federal, state, and local agencies. Developers could
also benefit if federal incentives motivate local governments to allow more
affordable housing developments.
However, builders like
Mercy are more focused right now on programs close to being finalized, such as
the next round of the HUD’s Neighborhood Stabilization Program or the weatherization
funding available from the Department of Energy.
“We’re cautious not to
bank on anything,” says Holmes of the Administration’s broader sustainable
development agenda, “But we are watching.”
Livability Principles
The federal Partnership
for Sustainable Communities has established six livability principles that will
act as a foundation for interagency coordination: