Obama Has Wealth of Choices for Next HUD Secretary

There are also a few long shots who would bring diverse experience to the HUD job if tapped by Obama. They include:

•Shaun Donovan, Commissioner of New York City’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development, which in September passed the halfway mark for raising funds for a $7.5 billion, 10-year plan to build and preserve 165,000 units of affordable housing for 500,000 New Yorkers. Donovan previously worked at Prudential Mortgage Capital as managing director of its FHA lending and affordable housing investments. He was a visiting scholar at New York University and a consultant to the Millennial Housing Commission on strategies for increasing the production of multifamily housing. And until March 2001, he was HUD’s Deputy Assistant Secretary for Multifamily Housing. Prior to joining HUD, he worked at New York’s Community Preservation Corporation, a nonprofit lender and developer of affordable housing.  Donovan holds master's degrees in public administration and architecture from Harvard University.

•Adolfo Carrion, currently Bronx Borough President in New York. With a master’s degree in urban planning from Hunter College, Carrion has focused on housing issues in the Bronx. He created The Bronx at Work Housing Series, hosted a symposium on affordable housing, and established a homeownership education program for Bronx home buyers. According to Carrion’s office, more than $2.2 billion has been invested in Bronx residential real estate since he became borough president in 2001. Additionally, Carrion allocated 40 percent of the borough’s capital funding in 2007 to housing development. His office did not respond to a call from BUILDER for comment regarding his reported consideration for the top HUD job. Carrion, 46, is married with three children.

•Bruce Katz is vice president and the founding director of the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program. He regularly advises political and business leaders on policy reforms that advance competitiveness of metropolitan areas, and he currently serves on HUD’s transition team, which will manage the change from current HUD Secretary Steve Preston to the new secretary, whenever that person is nominated and confirmed. Katz has been a long-time proponent of bolstering America’s human capital, clean technology jobs, and energy-efficient places. He is particularly keen on finding ways to maximize infrastructure investment.

•Bart Harvey, the 2008 winner of ULI’s J.C. Nichols Prize for Visionaries in Urban Development. He worked in Obama’s campaign and recently retired as chairman of Enterprise Community Partners, a national provider of development capital and technical expertise for affordable housing and neighborhood revitalization. Among his accomplishments, Harvey helped create the low-income housing tax credit, which now provides the funding for the vast majority of the nation’s affordable rental housing. Harvey declined to comment for this article.

John Caulfield is senior editor at BUILDER magazine. Senior editors Jenny Sullivan, Pat Curry, and Alison Rice contributed reporting for this article.