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Shelterforce: How did your time at New York City’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) prepare you for your tenure at the U.S. Department of Housing & Urban Development?

Secy. Donovan: I learned that the success of a neighborhood is intimately tied to the web of activity on the ground, and that understanding has really helped to inform a lot of the work that we’ve started to do around here, including [the HUD/DOT] Sustainable Communities Initiative.

At HUD, there’s an incredible sense of opportunity working outside of just the housing field and with other agencies. One of the things I enjoyed the most about—and learned the most from—the experience with the Bloomberg administration was whether it was the plan to end chronic homelessness in New York, whether it’s PlaNYC, the city’s sustainability plan, the most inspiring and exciting efforts really only happened because of strong leadership from City Hall and a collaboration across agencies. It wasn’t just HPD: it was the city planning department, the transportation department, the Economic Development Corporation, and so on, and fitting all of those pieces together that made that possible.

And I think what it has taught me is that we can only achieve our broader housing goals within the context of achieving healthier neighborhoods and cities and more sustainable places that HUD alone can’t create. So, I think those were two very important lessons taken from HPD that have helped me, along with real leadership from the White House. We’ve started to form those collaborations and think about how HUD can be a presence in those discussions on the ground.

Let’s face it: “UD” in HUD has been missing for a long time, and so we really have to re-engage with all of the things that contribute to urban development, not just the field of HUD’s own programs themselves. When you have a scenario on the ground that has a lack of flexibility and leadership, a sense of frustration arises, and I don’t know that New York can—or if any one place can—prepare you for trying to design a set of housing policies for the entire nation. I’ve now been to, I think, 27 states since I started, and to spend time on the Bering Sea in Alaska in a village of a thousand native Alaskans and then to go to the Northern Cheyenne Reservation in Montana presents a completely different experience. It is a big country, literally and figuratively, and we need to act with as much flexibility as possible.

Over time, HUD has been so concerned about just making mistakes and has pulled so much authority into the field, what we need to do, organizationally, is to rebuild a strong leadership presence in the field and really give authority to those folks in the field to customize solutions for local communities. While I saw that in my own experience in New York, it’s been amplified by my experience of seeing the diversity of challenges, but also, frankly, the lack of authority in existing leadership.

There’s an enormous amount of excitement right now within HUD about the opportunities that we have under our president, who has worked in public housing himself, a team now at HUD that are “housers,” and lots of people here who came to HUD to change the world.

And while there’s real excitement about that, the question we have to ask is: How do we create the structures that allows HUD to customize and frame solutions in local communities that match community development needs on the ground? That’s going to be a big part of what we’re in the process of answering as we transform the agency. [HUD Deputy Secretary] Ron Sims has been very focused on this, spending a lot of time with the field offices trying to figure out how we mature, that we get more authority out of the field to help solve local problems.