Meet Shaun Donovan.
Donovan's appointment is sure to irk progressives & conservatives alike, which makes his choice quintessentially Obaminium (rhymes with the British pronunciation of "aluminum").
As Commissioner of the New York Department of Housing Preservation and Development, Donovan has been a big fan of government partnering with community groups & the private sector to increase the stock of low-cost & affordable housing.
Case in point: Gowanus Canal.
He wants to turn this gonorrhea-ridden urban hellhole...
into this idyllic post-racial, post-classist utopia where white guys play jazz to no one in particular and people point skyward at will:
Those look like the happiest two geese in the history of the United States of America.
Such projects can be shoved down a community's throat through a melange of dirty backroom deals and sham community development forums. Donovan chose another path:
The selection of Gowanus Green as the development group for the Public Place site is the culmination of a lengthy community process in which community residents, community-based organization leaders, elected officials and staff from HPD and other city agencies worked together to determine what kind of development would best serve the surrounding communities as well as the City as a whole.
"After years of discussions and many failed attempts, we as a community can applaud the results of everyone involved in the effort to create a mixed-use development with an emphasis on both senior and affordable housing, housing the Carroll Gardens community desperately needs," said Assemblywoman Joan Millman.
This is music to the ears of us Third Wayers, and by "us," of course, I mean "me." But far from the rabid privatizers who have often been the only counterbalance to the top-down government dictators who have dominated public housing projects for decades, Donovan sees government as the key to building truly mixed-income communities:
"I would never believe that the private sector, left to its own devices, is the best possible solution," Mr. Donovan said recently. "I’m in government because of the role of government in setting rules and working in partnership with the private sector. On the other hand, there’s no way you could ever get to a scale that can really affect the housing problems in this country without working with the market."
And for him, such communities are both a matter of smart economic policy and (his words) "social justice":
Fundamentally, we must make sure we can continue to attract the low- and moderate-paid workers who fuel those economies.
So this is a fundamental competitive issue for the city as well as being a social justice issue. If the city can’t continue to attract and house—and it’s really been people from all over the world—it’s a real risk to our economy overall.
Working-class people as integral to a city's success: Donovan seems ever-conscious of the exclusionary dangers inherent in gentrification:
"We know that you, who have built back this community, could be squeezed out," he told the residents who had gathered for the groundbreaking that morning, taking refuge from the suffocating heat in St. Paul Community Baptist Church. "We want to be sure that the renaissance of this community is not something that happens to you, but something that happens for you."
If the Gowanus Canal project is any indication, his concern is more than mere lip service.
So I give a resounding hoosah to Shaun Donovan, Barack Obama's choice for Secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. And I think it's only fitting that he get the last word:
I think the fundamental challenge has been to demonstrate to the American people that they know affordable housing is important. What they don't necessarily know is that government knows how to do it right. ... The truth is, when affordable housing works, it's almost invisible. We're doing today, and lots of folks in this room are doing mixed income developments. We have a project that is moving its way through the approval and construction process right now in the Bronx that will combine market-rate condominiums with supportive housing with the formerly homeless. We are combining and integrating market-rate and affordable housing in a way that nobody would have thought possible a few decades ago.
Obama's announcement: