August 2001

Planning

Copyright by American Planning Association

My 30 Years at HUD

An honest assessment of a reflective federal bureaucrat.

By James Hoben, AICP

Last October, I completed a 33-year career as a community planner with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

In my new life, I am part-time coordinator for local ministries for my church, the Westminster Presbyterian Church in Alexandria, Virginia. As I take up a new set of challenges, I thought my reflections on those many years at HUD might be of interest to other planners.

It all started with a phone call. In 1969, I was a freshly minted planner with a master's in regional and city planning from the University of North Carolina. I was working for the Cleveland-Seven County Transportation and Land Use Study, the regional planning body then serving greater Cleveland. Out of the blue, I got a call from Charles Graves, director of HUD's 701 Comprehensive Planning Assistance Program. A classmate had suggested my name for a metropolitan planning position.

My first interview took place over a beer at Cleveland Hopkins airport, where Graves was changing planes en route to Washington, D.C. Intrigued by the possibilities, I flew to Washington to meet Charles Haar, the famous land-use lawyer and teacher, who, as assistant secretary, was in charge of the 701 program. He offered me the job, which I accepted readily. My salary jumped from $10,200 to $12,000 a year.

Over the next 33 years, I worked first in the 701 program, and then for three decades in the HUD Office of Policy Development and Research.

Great expectations

HUD's comprehensive planning assistance program, authorized under Section 701 of the 1954 housing act, provided two-thirds matching grants for planning by small towns and later metropolitan areas and states. In the 1970s, the annual grant total zoomed from $25 million a year to more than $125 million (about $300 million in today's dollars).

My first job was to design the housing element that was to be included in all the 701 plans. Communities were required to assess their current housing stock and to project future needs. Like many of my colleagues, I was incredibly naive in thinking that planners would plan and communities would build. We paid little attention to what was really needed: the development of local political constituencies that would ensure that the housing would be built.

By 1980, the 701 program was dead, a casualty, I believe, of a misguided change in direction. In the late 1970s, HUD's political leadership decided that the program should be recrafted. Instead of supporting long-range or medium-range land-use planning, 701 grants would support short-term planning to carry out a mayor's or budget director's program.

On the surface, it made sense to move planning to the center of local power. But we ignored some basic facts. One was that planning is a continuous process that cannot be turned on and off as funding becomes available. Second, most planners are not trained to do crisis management, a large part of a mayor's daily demands.

In the end, HUD could not show Congress specific benefits from the program. The 701 planning grant was among the first HUD casulaties when President Ronald Reagan took office in 1980.

A career in research

But long before all this, in 1970, I moved from the 701 program to the Office of Policy Development and Research to direct planning research. There I was privileged to work with some of the great minds of our profession (Don Hagman, Tony Downs, Bob Einsweiler, and many others); to provide modest funding for planning and development management research; and to encourage national distribution of completed works.

Though not a lawyer, I recognized that planners can do little without good laws. In line with this belief, I helped to launch the legislative guidebook now being completed by APA's Growing Smart program. The guidebook, which outlines a series of model planning and zoning laws, is the first federally supported update of such statutes since the Hoover Commission in the 1920s. We also supported other legal works, including Norman Williams's important treatise on American planning law and Richard Fishman's Housing for All Under the Law.

The research program also supported the development of various guides to assess the economic, fiscal, environmental, and social impacts of proposed development, such as The Fiscal Impact Handbook produced by Rutgers University. These guides were particularly needed following the passage in 1970 of the National Environmental Protection Act. NEPA and the state laws that came after it required that likely impacts be documented before a state or federally funded capital project was undertaken.

But NEPA and the impact assessment tools that came in its wake also had a downside. I believe that the inclination of planners and citizens to focus so heavily on costs contributed significantly to the later growth of the Not in My Backyard (NIMBY) syndrome and the slowdown in investment in needed infrastructure.

Several of the important studies we undertook were related to regional planning — a topic that needs far more attention. HUD provided the initial funding for metropolitan councils of government. And we commissioned the American Institute of Planners to do a study of regional housing planning; that study is now being revisited by APA with a focus on planning for affordable housing in the suburbs. Long ago, HUD funded studies on metropolitan fiscal disparities, a forerunner of the work being done today by Myron Orfield at the Metropolitan Area Research Center in Minnesota.

In the 1990s, much of my time was spent on addressing poverty issues. I directed evaluations of four HUD-administered homeless assistance programs that provided about $1 billion in grants annually and codirected, with the Department of Health and Human Services, the first National Survey of Homeless Assistance Providers and Clients. I'm proud of a report that distilled the lessons from a decade of national research on effective programs.

I also worked with four foundations to initiate the "Bridges to Work" demonstration project in five metropolitan areas. The project was meant to help inner-city residents find work in the suburbs through an integrated program of job training, transportation, and support services. The results are due next year.

Change of heart

With colleagues from EPA and the President's Council on Environmental Quality, I sponsored the original Costs of Sprawl. Later, I funded a study on urban infill — in a sense, the flip side of sprawl. Both were considered breakthrough studies at the time.

Since then, however, I have been deeply concerned about flaws in both the original and subsequent sprawl studies. As with an environmental impact statement, such studies must include benefits as well as costs. Also, more thought needs to be paid to the fact that one person's costs are often another's benefit. Today's popular condemnation of sprawl is an example of a one-sided viewpoint.

Low-density suburbs do have significant road, sewer, and visual costs. It's also true, however, that the availability of inexpensive land has allowed the construction of vast amounts of affordable, modern housing with considerable private open space for a majority of Americans.

The number-one complaint about sprawl is auto congestion. A major culprit has to be the decline in road construction since the 1970s, relative to population and economic expansion. The often-recommended solution, urban infill, is not always feasible. Infill is an uncertain process and can be very expensive. That doesn't mean that the public sector should not attempt infill or redevelopment, only that we must be prepared to make the needed commitment.

Money troubles

The 701 legislation provided that up to five percent of the program's appropriation could be used for research and demonstrations. When 701 died, obtaining research funds for planning became a constant struggle.

We had to compete for money with studies of building technology mortgage capital, annual funding of the American Housing Survey, and evaluations of HUD operating programs. Among federal agencies, HUD ranks very low in funding for evaluation, research, and demonstration programs.

In this fiscal year, the HUD appropriation for research and development is $55 million out of an approximate $30 billion budget — two-tenths of one percent. The Department of Transportation allocates 15 times that amount for R&D.

Given this situation, I hope that APA will consider applying pressure on HUD and its appropriations committees. One approach might be to ask for an earmarked authorization for planning research to be included in future 701-type legislation and appropriations for capital expenditures.

Follow me?

Would I advise planners to work for HUD today? Absolutely.

In my years with HUD, I enjoyed the contact with interesting people and the opportunities for interagency cooperation. I was pleased to have a hand in the many good works completed by very able researchers. No less important were the financial benefits. Federal salaries are equivalent to or better than local or state public planning agencies, and the federal government offers attractive flexible work schedules.

On the other hand, my job required much resilience and persistence. There was often considerable indecision about sponsoring work that was intended to strengthen local and state capacity. And being low on the national popularity list, HUD often did not get top-notch appointees.

Listen up

I am alarmed when I hear planners proclaim that the federal highway and mortgage insurance programs are guilty, along with greedy developers, of creating today's sprawl. Certainly, we can do better to encourage more urban contiguity, variations in densities, mixed use, and jobs-housing balance, but we won't get there without first understanding the true causes of today's problems. That understanding requires looking carefully into the real sources of our problems.

Further, solving these problems requires forming coalitions. Alone, our strength as planners is limited by our relatively small number. Allied with others, we can do wonders.

Still, I'm optimistic. Twenty years after the demise of the 701 program, I believe that we will soon see renewed federal interest in comprehensive planning. Witness Congress's new bipartisan attitude, and the proposed Community Character Act of 2001, which would authorize a $50 million grant program to reform outdated state planning statutes. APA is rallying support for this one, and you should, too.