Shelterforce The journal of affordable housing and community building

Fall 2009 » November 23, 2009

Shelterforce Interview: Xavier de Souza Briggs

By Harold Simon & Matthew Brian Hersh

Xavier de Souza Briggs, Associate Director for General Government Programs at the White House Office of Management and Budget is responsible for not only the “budget” of numerous government agencies and departments but also provides guidance to these agencies so that each of their individual programs and efforts contribute to the entire agenda and support each other. Briggs’ portfolio includes HUD, the Treasury, Commerce, Justice, Transportation, and Homeland Security departments, as well as the U.S. Postal Service and the government-sponsored enterprises like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. All of these make a direct and profound impact in the community development world.

And community development is a field that Briggs knows intimately. Early in his career he was a planner in the South Bronx and later a senior official at HUD during Clinton’s second term. He has also been a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and then at MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning. He has researched and written on many aspects of the field including metropolitan strategies, race, housing, poverty and grass-roots civil society organizations. In his forthcoming book, Moving to Opportunity (co-authored with Susan J. Popkin and John Goering) Briggs takes a close look at this controversial program to help families out of communities with concentrated poverty.

Briggs’ most recent article in Shelterforce, “Urban Policy Next” (Fall 2008), laid out a comprehensive approach to urban development, including a push for increased public-private coordination for cities to compete globally, with regional planning centers and regional councils. Clearly, this is a part of the Obama administration: to not work in isolation. So how do we put it all together?

On June 24, 2009, Briggs spoke with Shelterforce at his office at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. The hour-long conversation covered a range of topics including the philosophy and politics of urban revitalization the nuts and bolts of community development, visions for the future, and why, in trying economic times, “we have to act quickly and we have to be careful at the same time.”

SF: Please tell us how you arrived at the Office of Management and Budget?

Late last summer, I was involved with two of the Obama campaign’s policy committees, the ones dealing with urban policy and housing policy. They were overlapping but somewhat distinct groups. I was also helping to canvass voters, mainly in New Hampshire, since I could drive up from my home in Boston. Then, I got a call in mid-September asking me to be a part of the transition team for phase one, which meant the pre-election phase. They were asking me to join this team of people thinking about “how the Obama administration should govern if the Senator wins.” Suffice it to say, it’s something you make time for and it was an honor to be asked. It was extraordinary to be able to serve in this way and to reconnect with great people with solid values, policy smarts, and political savvy. The transition team experience was a real highlight of my career.

I was part of the HUD Agency Review Team. The transition was organized into agency reviews and then crosscutting themes like climate change or energy policy, things that are bigger than one agency.

We worked feverishly and delivered a document that was very prospective, because the outcome of the election was still uncertain, of course, and we had not had access to the agency itself. We had to rely on publicly available information, our own assessments of what had been going on at HUD and in the communities and issue areas in which HUD is active, and so on. But this was still a pre-transition—it’s not a real transition ‘til you’ve won.

But then you did win.

Obviously there was great excitement. And in the late stages there, in the last few days before the election, the feeling was that the team had done a great job. The transition leadership asked us if we would consider staying on as part of a Phase II, post-election.

The transition paid extraordinary attention to effective management and implementation, and what it would mean to have a successful first hundred days, first year, first two years, and so on.

And the word came very early on from Phase I prior to the election and was underscored in Phase II afterward: “We’re out to put the president and his leadership team and the whole cabinet in a position to steer the machinery of government in a way that very quickly signals a turn on policy issues, a commitment to making government work again, rebuilding the public confidence, and a commitment to transparency around results.”

All this was fantastic for me as someone who, beyond my urban policy background, has taught strategy, management, negotiation, and collaboration through the years. And to really know, too, that this was spelled out very concretely in working principles—this was fantastic.

What types of expectations did you have going into the transition?

The campaign ran under a “no drama” ethic. We wanted the transition to do the same. They basically said, “We thank you for your service, but this invitation is not a signal that you will be invited to serve in the administration. You do this for the country, period.” That was how it was, and I was fine with that. I think everybody else who signed up was, too. I appreciated that message. I think we all did.

When were you asked to stay on board post-Inauguration?

As we neared the completion of the work, in early December, I got a call saying there’s a key portfolio that needs to be filled at the Office of Management and Budget. It oversees HUD, Treasury, Commerce, SBA, DOT, DOJ, Homeland Security, and a host of independent agencies—the financial regulators, even the US Postal Service. I got a call from Peter Orszag’s chief of staff, and I was encouraged by respected colleagues to seriously consider this. I had not thought of OMB, specifically, as a place to work. I knew it by reputation and from interactions I had with OMB when I served at HUD a decade ago. But I ended up meeting with Peter, and with his deputy, Rob Nabors, a few days before Christmas.

We talked about this portfolio and their hopes. And about a week later, I got the call, “We’d love you to join if that’s still of interest to you.” And I was thrilled about that, and thrilled to take this on. It is a very, very broad portfolio, so the concerns and the issues at the heart of Shelterforce and of the field, this portfolio touches in 100 different ways.

It does connect to some other things that are less at the heart, I would say, of the magazine but are, at the end of the day, also community concerns more broadly defined and very relevant to community development.

An example would be the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. NOAA’s the federal government’s lead for coastal zone management, and it’s going to become increasingly important with climate change and climate adaptation—kind of a large-scale community development challenge, in a lot of ways. It connects to economy, livelihood, culture, public and private relationships, financial and otherwise.

Another example would be border security, given the concerns along border towns, and really transnational concerns, right, a bi-national set of concerns about safety in particular places and the flow of arms, drugs, human smuggling. Crime and security are so central to how places develop, where dollars need to go, and so on. Again, these are community development issues, broadly defined.

And as for my portfolio, those are in addition, of course, to the big questions in housing policy, the big questions for any anti-poverty agenda, access to the middle class, green jobs, the reauthorization of surface transportation—federal investments in roads, transit, and other options—and on and on.

OMB has been terrific. Not only do we work with a very energized cabinet, but we’re united behind a reform-minded president; a president who cares about good management, better coordination, reform.

In addition, we’re able to nudge where we don’t see that happening.

Nudge how?

We have such a central role, given all the different things that OMB does, to influence the agencies and work with them and help them up their game. The role of OMB is very broad.

In post-Katrina Gulf Coast redevelopment housing, schools, health, jobs all needed to be dealt with simultaneously. What are the lessons from such large-scale and urgent community development work?

It is inter-agency at the federal level, done right. It is inter-governmental, and there are real challenges to making the federal government a better partner and making federal programs effective when their impact is highly dependent on what states and localities decide to do.

These are such extraordinary times. It’s not just that the president has an electoral mandate and that we’ve inherited massive problems. It’s that the country is in a real fiscal hole, and we take this very, very seriously. There’s obviously a lot of demand for expanded investment, not just new approaches to investment.

We are going to be under more and more pressure to show what federal taxpayer dollars are really buying—not just what issues they are addressing, numbers of people they serve—but concrete outcomes. We have to act quickly and we have to be careful at the same time.

But politics often muck up things, and while a thoughtful leader intends to lead long-term, the reality is election cycles force you to think very short-term.

We’ve seen quite a few states, cities, and small towns step up and recognize the uniqueness of this moment, and this administration has conversely recognized the very high expectation the public has for their tax dollars, which are extraordinary by any measure.

My last book, Democracy as Problem Solving, was about civic capacity in communities across the globe—the U.S., Brazil, South Africa, India. It was about the local leadership for change, but in ways that implicated the higher levels of government—states, the federal government. Our rules and dollars, the knowledge we invest in and disseminate, the bully pulpit—all of these things matter.

There are innovators working for constructive change, systems change, across America, and we need to empower them, understanding that change is going to play out differently from place to place.

You mentioned there was a need to create a new infrastructure of support, suggesting that CDCs and CBOs will play greater roles in achieving the administration’s objectives. What will those roles be?

Number one, the notion of flexible capacity, flexible capability at the community level cuts both ways. On one hand, I think most of us are conscious of how flexibility and adaptability by CDCs is a tremendous plus. They were essentially born to fill in all sorts of gaps and to take on whatever was most important and to respond to community will, and that’s the best of the community development movement in so many ways.

On the other hand, such flexibility makes it harder for those outside the field to recognize what you are, to understand what you’re really good at, and how they should invest in you in a way that leads to clear results. And it does raise the competition question: Are there others out there that are perhaps more specialized, who can claim to be better than a CDC at some important task?

Anything you can do to help make a stronger, more complete, more evidence-based case of the comparative advantage of the accomplishments of CDCs in areas that are clear national priorities is essential. It’s a range of areas that includes clean energy, sustainability, wellness and better health outcomes—reducing costs, improving outcomes in health—tackling poverty as the economy continues to change, helping young people make safer choices, creating more avenues to the middle class.

I think we need to sharpen that case. With so many competing claims on resources, I think we need to stick at that work and answer those questions.

It seems that there’s a good deal of confusion as to whether certain services should be done by government, whether it should be done by the private sector, or the nonprofit sector and, more specifically, the CDC community.

I think you hit it on the head. In the South Bronx, for example, CDCs had, by the 1980s if not before, become surrogates for government. That’s the way Anita Miller—who ran the LISC South Bronx office before designing and launching the Comprehensive Community Revitalization Program with six large CDCs—put it years ago. And she was right. The CDCs had stepped into the breach in the worst years of disinvestment and abandonment by government.

And the president gets it because he’s a former community organizer, and he knows what it’s like to have to step in and fill in the gaps. However, I do think there’s a time and place to make tough choices and to say, “I’ll do a number of things, but I want to certify, as an organization, that my board is working with me, my staff is working with me, my funders are behind me as investors, and we are going to be extraordinary at two or three things. We’ll do some other things to help fill in the gaps where it’s absolutely essential, and here and there we’re also going to have the courage to say, ‘Someone else needs to do this work.’ We may not always love the way they do it, but someone else needs to take this on.”

I do think we need to continue the conversation we’ve seen across the field, over the last decade or so, about things like consolidation, mergers, and partnerships of various kinds. There are various ways to arrange the organizational lines around the work that needs to get done and it is time to be bold and to be relentless about results, even when it makes you unpopular, even when it’s an unwelcome message, even when it’s not what your board is used to hearing. If that ain’t leadership, what is?

We face tough choices. Dollars are finite and citizen expectations about results and reform are stratospheric. To find solutions, we’re asking that there be a creative, courageous, principled rethinking of how to achieve results as opposed to how to protect turf.

What will distinguish the leading organizations that help define the next stage of the field and not simply a set of policy priorities will have to do with the substantive problems out in the world and how we define them today—climate change, economic security, opportunity in a changing economy, those kinds of things.

It’s important that we have those priorities and beacons to chart our course by, but the hard work and the grunt work, but the priceless work, too, I think is also that leadership work on the ground. We want to invest in the capacity of this sector, but I think that leadership work needs to go further, too.

And then leaders in the field can speak more in a more united voice about what they think the federal investment—in the work of neighborhood revitalization, say—should look like and what it can yield in the way of results. A number of Administration proposals, from Promise Zones at the Department of Education to Choice Neighborhoods at HUD, present especially important opportunities to weigh in.

Is there a new National Community Development Initiative in the foreseeable future? What does an NCDI of the future look like?

We have much more discussion ahead about capacity-building strategy. We have more discussion ahead about the lessons, over the long haul, not just the last several years, how Living Cities has evolved, for example, out of NCDI. One of the challenges of the foreclosure crisis is that we need more effective capacity building for local governments, not just nonprofit community developers—how to plan strategically, how to blend and leverage different streams of dollars for greater effect, how to work most effectively with for-profit and nonprofit organizations and focus on outcomes, and more.

On the other hand, there is a new moment now, and we want to empower local leaders to integrate housing strategies with other key elements of sustainable, inclusive, prosperous communities. Just recently, OMB issued budget guidance to agencies on the administration’s principles for “place policy,” for approaching those goals in integrated ways on behalf of communities, being less fragmented in our approach. It’s on the OMB website, anyone can read it. A wide variety of agencies are taking up that challenge.

There are no blueprints for how things need to work everywhere, but we have working models of what those workforce systems can look like when they are high performing. Look at Project Quest in San Antonio and other models that were documented carefully more than a decade ago. I think you’re going to see us encouraging a lot of that forging of networks and asking for answers on that front. We need to use the excitement about green jobs to do real systems building and reform. We need to connect the supply and demand sides of the job market. The Vice President has charged HUD, Energy, and other agencies—who create job demand—to do that with Recovery Act dollars, to work in tandem with the Department of Labor, which supports the supply of workers with the right skills. But we have so much more to do.

And we want to have a bolder conversation about rural America. We need to think about real regional economic prospects, links between rural and metro areas, more coordinated federal funding. We have to balance demand for economic innovation—including green sectors—that is nascent but promising with efforts to build on things that are well established in rural communities, deeply rooted in traditions, skills, and other local assets.

How do we get this done with the urgency of the moment, but also maintain a long view?

You’re going to see us take this notion of place-based policy and use it as a discipline, use it as a focusing device across the agencies and within them across their programs, and also look to engage the wider world and do public engagement sessions and work with states and local governments and tribes and members of Congress to ask these questions. If we can create real strategies that strengthen communities, both rural and urban, what’s the most appropriate role for the federal investments and for regulations that shape local action? And how can the federal government better organize itself to act like one government and not dozens of stovepipes?

I think we’re going to have to have tough conversations about those things, and it’s going to unsettle some people, but there’s no other way to do this.

Thank you.

Published by the National Housing Institute