For instance, the Puget Sound Regional Council, has a Vision 2040 plan, and the region is soon to build a new regional transit system, so the HUD money is supposed to help PSRC capitalize on the transportation investment to get sound housing and economic development done.
City Limits Magazine
January 2011:
The UnPlanned City
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Plans? Check. Action?
Some of the proposals are a little vague, but that's the point: the HUD money is supposed to encourage the next stage in planning. And in some cases specifics are impossible because the public has not been consulted yet on what it wants.
"We're going to try to have really unprecedented public involvement throughout the project," says Carrie Runser-Turner, senior planner at the Land-of-Sky Regional Council in Western North Carolina, who didn't want to get into specifics about what the ultimate plan might contain. “We want to make sure we're not going into it with preconceived notions. We want it to be a living document that doesn't just stay on the shelf—something that's relevant and can be updated.”
The goal, Runser-Turner says, is to end up with more than just a plan. “We want to have tangible projects that can be implemented on a variety of scales.".
Indeed, planning can seem fairly abstract, so for Obama's urban policy to win political favor—and funding—tangible projects will be key.
But getting things done, even with the Obama administration's funding of local planning, is never easy, as Lyle Wray can tell you. Wray's the executive director of the Capitol Region Council of Governments in Connecticut, recipients of $4.2 million in the October round. CRCOG plans a raft of initiatives—incentives for creating density near transit, sustainability training for local zoning commissioners, studying where to put bus lines so they tie housing and jobs together.
It also wants to build upon an existing Knowledge Corridor linking the college-rich areas of central Connecticut and western Massachusetts. The Corridor pitches the region to employers who might locate there, and collaborates on workforce development.
But a linchpin of the CRCOG plan is a busway between Hartford and New Britain, a small city 9 miles from the capitol. The plan aims to speed commutes along car-choked Interstate 84 by creating a separate channel for buses.
After at least 12 years of intermittent talk about the idea, the state is poised to go ahead with the idea. If it were built, Wray says, it would afford a rare chance for transit-oriented development in the region.
But a rising price-tag has revived opponents of the busway. Summing up the threat to all of Obama's urban agenda, Wray sizes up the odds facing big ideas: “The political and financial environment is not very friendly.”
