Federal Urban Policies

The Urban Institute and Silber & Associates recently surveyed 7,000 service delivery partners of U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to ask: Is HUD good or bad to work with? Does HUD provide appropriate guidance, information and resources? Are HUD staff capable and responsive?

Respondents included local community development departments, public housing agencies, single family lenders, mayor's offices, HUD-assisted and insured multifamily developments, fair housing agencies and nonprofit organizations. Some HUD partners are more satisfied than others, and more satisfied with certain aspects of HUD than others. See which partners gave HUD high or low marks and why in the full report.

Funding and investing in infrastructure are not only about finding adequate resources to meet the demands of citizenry, but rather requires understanding of how infrastructure fits into the broader functions of government. This brief examines the key role of pricing infrastructure projects and how the total cost of a project (including lifetime maintenance costs) should be included in funding decisions. Current federal and state policies often encourage new building rather than maintenance and care of existing infrastructure. The role of public-private partnerships in infrastructure projects is also sometimes more about political rather than economic considerations. The author presents options to better coordinate infrastructure financing and payments across levels of government.

While much has been written about the decline of central cities, very little research has examined the problem in their suburbs. This report focuses on the suburbs of older industrial cities and how best to address the challenges they face. Using census data, literature review, and four in-depth case studies, the authors provide a detailed portrait of the underlying forces shaping distressed suburbs. It highlights a range of best practices used in case study cities for fostering growth and reducing poverty. These lessons can be instructive both to local leaders working to turn their cities around and to the federal policy makers supporting them.

In an effort to better understand existing capacity for research on urban sustainability, researchers from the Center for Sustainability at USC conducted a survey of urban sustainability centers at U.S. universities. This analysis is the first phase of a larger project geared towards identifying a research agenda and developing common performance metrics to support federal sustainability initiatives. Results of the survey of 25 sustainability centers indicate that they are unevenly distributed throughout the country, operate on relatively low budgets, and face challenges securing funds for interdisciplinary sustainability research. A survey of current research activities suggests needed synthesis projects and framing papers on an array of sustainability topics.

Analysis of the conditions of rental markets in the wake of the Great Recession reveals a troubling forecast for multifamily properties and the households that inhabit them. Despite increasing rental vacancies since the beginning of the housing bust, the number of low and extremely low income renters swelled, resulting in notable increases in households paying over acceptable levels on rent. Further, even as the rental property climate improves in some metropolitan areas, tenuous rental income and increases in operating costs will expose marginally viable properties to increased financial risks. For renters, this amounts to deteriorating physical conditions and a lower supply of decent, affordable housing. From What Works Collaborative, a partnership of academia and policy think tanks including the Urban Institute.

Though the nation's manufacturing sector has decreased significantly over the past half century, these businesses remain critical to the strength of the innovation economy and the mobility of low-income households. A large portion of small manufacturers are clustered in urban areas, but federal policy has neglected or hindered these valuable assets. This paper identifies ways that government can facilitate the growth of small-scale urban manufacturers within a greater economic development scheme. Government agencies can utilize this sector by first identifying the unique manufacturing assets of local and regional areas and prioritizing them within policy, regulation, and public investment.

Living in concentrated poverty stifles the life chances of adults and children. Efforts to transform neighborhoods of extreme poverty into places of opportunity must grapple with concentrated disadvantages including distressed housing, failing schools, joblessness, poor health, and violence. Two federal initiatives seeking to address neighborhood deficiencies simultaneously are the Department of Education's Promise Neighborhoods effort and the Department of Housing and Urban Development's Choice Neighborhoods program. Evaluating these efforts presents many methodological challenges. This brief provides a framework for designing evaluations of Choice and Promise Neighborhoods including key research questions, different research approaches, and components of an evaluation strategy.

Germany is leading the way in developing "green" technologies and has the most ambitious energy-saving program in Europe, aiming for a 30 percent reduction in energy usage by 2020, and a 30-percent renewable energy share, consisting mainly of biomass, wind, and solar. Germany's experience - its success and lessons learned - provide a solid evidence base from which nations like the United States can "leapfrog" Europe, and tackle even more pressing energy and climate change demands through deliberate public and private action.