HUD

Government workers are turning to Uber and Lyft on business trips, with a 922-percent increase in spending last year, newly released records from the General Services Administratiaon show. At the same time, workers are using less transit.

Republicans want to cut off federal data that social science researchers depend on, limiting our ability to understand the effects of transportation and land use policy, especially on the most vulnerable Americans.

It was a sad day in Washington, DC, last year when Harriet Tregoning left the DC Office of Planning. But it’s becoming clear that she's a great addition at HUD.

Losing Shaun Donovan at the helm of HUD was a blow for urbanists. This afternoon President Obama formally announced the nomination of San Antonio Mayor Julián Castro to replace Donovan as the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. What will the transition mean for the agency, which under Donovan championed smart growth and the integration of transportation and housing programs?

A few years ago, the Center for Neighborhood Technology gave a wonderful gift to urbanists and planners: the Housing + Transportation Index. This simple calculation clarified and popularized a key concept: that transportation costs must be taken into account in any measurement of “affordability.”

Let’s say you worked for a city that was trying to revitalize a piece of land with a bunch of dilapidated buildings on it. You want to build some residences and some retail space, and you want to make better connections to the street grid. Congratulations – HUD and U.S. DOT both have money to help you get where you’re going. Except, oops: HUD is going to demand that you hire locally, to create jobs in the community, while U.S. DOT is going to demand that you get a competitive bid, showing no preference for local hires. Everyone you talk to at either agency just scratches their heads and says they don’t know anything about the other agency. They wouldn’t even know who to talk to over there.

I don’t know how many RSVPs a HUD conference call usually gets, but everyone seemed pretty floored that a stakeholder teleconference yesterday got upwards of 400. Officials said it was a testament to the popularity of HUD’s Office of Sustainable Housing and Communities and the grant programs it runs together with EPA and U.S. DOT.

Just days after the interagency Partnership for Sustainable Communities was issued a death blow by having its funding axed in the FY2012 transportation budget, which President Obama signed into law Friday, HUD issued a reminder of just how sad that loss is: The agency released its list of 2011 award grantees -- communities embarking on visionary projects that, with this assistance, will enable them to plan for the future holistically.

In 2004, Salt Lake City faced a challenging question: How do you fit 1.4 million additional residents into a region hemmed in by mountains on the east and water on the west? In the course of solving that problem, the city ended up answering several other head-scratchers, like: How do you get buy-in for smart-growth policies from conservatives wary of urbanism? And, how do you make new greenfield development both sustainable and wildly popular?