Housing is a Moral Issue: Shaun Donovan
December 7th, 2023
“We know that solving homelessness is possible.”
Shaun Donovan is the CEO and President of Enterprise Community Partners. We discuss how the deeply entrenched housing crisis has become worse in recent years and the multiple strategies to make home and community places of pride, power, and belonging.
Housing is a basic need that is fundamental to democratic participation. The lack of housing is preventing communities around the country from attracting workers and studies show slowing GDP growth due to housing affordability. People across the US are increasingly recognizing that housing isn't just a moral issue or an issue of justice for low-income people. It's a larger challenge for our society.
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Credits:
Host: Mila Atmos
Guest: Shaun Donovan
Executive Producer: Mila Atmos
Producer: Zack Travis
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Shaun Donovan Transcript
Mila Atmos: [00:00:00] Thanks to Shopify for supporting Future Hindsight. Shopify is a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere, giving entrepreneurs like us the resources once reserved for big business. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com/hopeful. All lowercase.
Mila Atmos: [00:00:24] Welcome to Future Hindsight, a podcast that takes big ideas about civic life and democracy and turns them into action items for you and me. I'm Mila Atmos.
We're all too familiar with the fact that we are in the midst of a deep and already long entrenched housing crisis. Nimbyism is making things even more complicated, and it appears to be getting worse, not better. While housing has always played out in local and state elections, it has now become increasingly important in national elections. Though we might disagree on what to do about the problem. I think that the words of Jimmy McMillan ring true.
Jimmy McMillan: [00:01:10] Rent! It's too damn high!
Mila Atmos: [00:01:13] We've had a few conversations on housing this year, from understanding that homelessness is a housing problem, to learning the lived experience of tenants in New York City. In sum, it's clear housing is basically unaffordable for many Americans. Today, we are excited to speak to the leader of a non-profit organization with 40 years of experience in addressing America's massive shortage of affordable rental homes, called Enterprise Community Partners. It's the only national nonprofit that does it all under one roof. Solutions, Capital, and Community Development.
Shaun Donovan is the CEO and president of the organization and brings a wealth of experience to this topic. He was former Housing and Urban Development Secretary under Obama, and served as commissioner of the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development in the Bloomberg administration. Welcome, Shaun. Thank you for joining us.
Shaun Donovan: [00:02:07] It's great to be here. Thanks for having me.
Mila Atmos: [00:02:10] So let's jump right in. Describe the current crisis in housing and how is it worse than it ever was?
Shaun Donovan: [00:02:18] Well, I've been doing this about 30 years, starting in the South Bronx. I grew up here in New York City, and I would say the crisis has been getting worse over those decades. But during the Covid crisis, we actually saw rents increasing more than we ever have, since we started keeping records. Literally never seen bigger increases, 18% increase in rent year over year. And I think what is different about it, beyond the numbers, is the level of homelessness we see on our streets. And so often the housing issues have been problems of the coasts, or problems of big cities. Now, I was talking to a senator the other day who said just kind of nonchalantly, "well, our housing crisis in Bozeman, Montana," and it is really that the crisis is everywhere now. The depth of it is so intense that I think people across the country are starting to grapple with issues that have long been issues in New York or other places, but now it's really become a national crisis in a different way.
Mila Atmos: [00:03:27] It's interesting that you mentioned that the rents have increased so much, 18% in some spaces, and that there is a housing crisis in places like Bozeman, Montana. What do you think is the source of this crisis, and is it really specifically Covid, or is it well beyond that?
Shaun Donovan: [00:03:46] Well, what I would say is we've had a chronic crisis for a long time. If you go back decades, we've seen that more and more people are paying outrageous shares of their income towards rent, especially. And the challenge is that on top of that, decades of increases, we then had this incredibly acute crisis on top of the chronic one during Covid. And part of that, frankly, was that people became much more interested in more space at home. When you're working at home, you probably want to have something other than just a bedroom, right? And there was more and more demand for housing. But what we also saw was there was a short term help for people with rent. They were able to stay in their homes because the federal government put lots of money into protecting people against evictions. But as that money is going away, you have rents that are still much higher than they were, but people's incomes are going back down in ways that are really challenging them. And the most visible crisis that you see out of that is the homelessness on our streets. But there's a silent crisis. Two
families living in shelters, people doubled up across the country, and people not putting food on the table at night or not being able to buy their kids the books that they need, or so many other ways, that we always say rent eats first. Everything else gets put to the side because rents are going up and up.
Mila Atmos: [00:05:19] Well, speaking of rent eating first; in your mind, what is affordable housing? Now, I know that simply means broadly that it's the housing that you can afford, and that looks different in a place like New York or Bozeman or Detroit. But at Enterprise, how do you think about affordable housing?
Shaun Donovan: [00:05:36] Well, we think about it in a few ways. The simplest way to answer that is we have a federal standard that people shouldn't pay more than 30% of their income, about a third of their income towards their housing. So that's a simple way of answering the question. But we also really believe that it isn't just about the housing being affordable, it is also about the quality of the housing. Think about the depth of whether it's asthma or lead paint, or a whole range of problems that come from where we live. It's also about your neighborhood. The truth about housing is that where you live determines so many things in your life. Because when you choose a home, you choose a neighborhood, right? You choose where your kids go to school, you choose your access to jobs. Even one of the things we've seen if your neighborhood isn't safe, if you don't have sidewalks, the ability to exercise, mental health. There are so many things that suffer based on the community that you live in. And so we look at it not just as the affordability and the quality, but also making sure that homes are part of neighborhoods of opportunity and housing is the primary building block, if you will, of neighborhoods.
Mila Atmos: [00:06:53] Well, Enterprise's mission on the website is to make home and community places of pride, power and belonging, and platforms for resilience and upward mobility for all. You explained all that much better just now, but in real terms, in practice, what does that actually look like to you?
Shaun Donovan: [00:07:13] We are unique really in the world of housing because we work on it from all the different directions. And what do I mean by that? Well, we started 40 years ago when our founder, Jim Rouse, met a group of women, women in Washington, D.C., who started an organization, a nonprofit called Jubilee Housing. And
they were an example of a whole movement around the country where community development organizations were coming together. People in their communities, particularly low income people of color, were standing up, oftentimes against the model of urban renewal, where the government was coming in and knocking down their neighborhoods. They were saying, we want to have the vision for our neighborhood. We want to rebuild our neighborhood. And affordable housing has to be good housing. It has to be affordable, it has to be quality housing. And so Jim Rouse was inspired by that. And to this day, 40 years later, one of our primary things that we do is to help these local organizations, typically nonprofit, be able to get all the tools that they need to improve their neighborhoods. Sometimes that means we bring them capital. We're almost like a nonprofit bank. Sometimes it means we bring them technical assistance. We bring them answers of how to build housing, how to access the latest technology for making their housing sustainable. We created the Green Community Standard, which is the kind of benchmark in affordable housing for what it means to be green when you build affordable housing. But we also bring not just to local organizations. We bring to mayors and governors. We bring to Congress new solutions, innovations in ways that they can pursue new forms of affordable housing, better affordable housing, more effective affordable housing. And then finally, what's really interesting about the work that we do, in addition to the financing and the solutions, we own and manage over 14,000 apartments that are affordable in the Mid-Atlantic. And so we are in many ways on the ground helping residents, understanding what works and what doesn't in ways that this isn't just theory to us, this is practice. And so that's what really makes us unique, is we do all of these different things within housing, and we're really the only organization in the country that has all of these different pieces.
Mila Atmos: [00:09:29] Yeah, I thought that was really interesting. You do all the pieces, and you said just now that you bring capital, which is to say that you lend money. Is that right?
Shaun Donovan: [00:09:38] We do. We make loans, but we also invest equity, whether it's in the housing that we own ourselves. The single biggest way that the federal government invests in new affordable housing today is called the Low Income Housing Tax Credit. And we are the biggest providers of capital for investors who want to invest in that kind of housing. So it's lending, but it's also a whole range of other kinds of
capital as well. And really we're innovators with capital. I'll give you a couple of examples.
Mila Atmos: [00:10:09] Yeah. Give me an example.
Shaun Donovan: [00:10:09] One of the big issues we have is the growing wealth gap in our country. And that's particularly true along racial lines. Black and Latino families are dramatically lower wealth than white families in the country. And it's been getting worse. How do we save money? How do we build wealth through home ownership? But the gaps and the barriers to homeownership for low income families, particularly for families of color, are enormous. So one of the approaches we've taken is to say, what if we could raise capital to invest in rental housing that could actually build equity for the renters? What if we could find new ways of building wealth that isn't through the traditional home ownership? And so what we've done is created a fund, found mission oriented investors. We're now partnering with nonprofits buying rental housing. And each month we're setting aside money for the residents of that housing to help them build wealth. And if the building ever refinances its loan or gets sold, we will give a share of the profits, whatever increase in value that property has to the the residents. So that's an example of an innovative form of capital that we're providing that's really mission oriented in new ways. We fund, for example -- partnered with Wells Fargo -- Housing Innovation Competition. And we're making all kinds of different types of investments, new technology. Take an example. We know that public housing in this country is desperately in need of new capital and needs to be rebuilt. Here in New York City alone, there's about a $40 billion gap in capital. One of the winners of our prize this year was a whole new system that could come in, instead of having to break open the walls, rebuild the whole structure of the building, you can actually put a brand new envelope around the existing building, put in all the new systems. It's much more energy efficient and much more cost effective to be able to make the buildings not just better in terms of plumbing leaks and and health, but it also reduced the amount of water that's needed, be able to install solar and all kinds of new forms of power for the building. And so it's a really interesting, innovative model. Those are the kinds of things that we try to fund, not just bring your traditional capital, but to bring new forms of capital and new forms of innovation to housing.
Mila Atmos: [00:12:37] Oh, interesting. You mentioned just now about putting an envelope around a building. So is this your strategy to have green investments or to have climate resilient housing?
Shaun Donovan: [00:12:50] Absolutely. We are the leaders in not just sustainable but also resilient. What do I mean by that? Obviously we want to use less energy in housing. We want to electrify housing because more and more, the way to reduce our emissions is to bring, whether it's wind or solar or new forms of renewable power. So we have to transform these buildings into using electricity to power them. So we actually just applied to the federal government for $9.5 billion. This is a huge part of the Inflation Reduction Act, the enormous climate bill that President Biden passed a year and a half ago. And we would be a leader in making sure, from individual homes to large apartment buildings that were helping them get the technology they need, putting solar on the roofs, putting heat pumps in, and all of the other steps they need to be more energy efficient and to electrify. So sometimes we're doing that by technical assistance. We have a nonprofit that we work with, and they're interested in doing that. We can help them understand the latest technologies. We can help them get access to it, help them find good contractors to do that. There's an enormous amount of confusion about this. People don't know what heat pumps are. They don't know how they work. And so that technical assistance is enormously important. But we also can provide the funding for it. And we're doing it in our own housing. We're using our own housing as a laboratory, if you will, to test new techniques and strategies to be able to make them more, more resilient. But the other thing we know is that with climate change, storms are becoming much more frequent, whether it's flooding from rain events or from -- if you're close to the water -- the flooding that we saw in hurricane Sandy, for example. Wind. Increasing heat. There are so many different ways that climate change are putting communities at risk. What we also know, frankly, is that low income people and communities are more at risk than anyone else. We saw that after Hurricane Katrina with the lower Ninth Ward. Low income people tend to live in more vulnerable communities to climate change. And so one of our focuses as well is to try to make housing more resilient to those storms, not just lower the energy use, make it more sustainable, but also make it more resilient. And we're a leader on that as well. And that's everything from elevating homes so they're not washed away by storms or floods, to how do you lower the heat that's captured by a rooftop? We know, for example, that heat leads to strokes, particularly in older people. Lowering the energy usage, lowering the costs for families. We can save
about $3,000 a year on average, we think, by electrifying low income homes. There are very few things that can save a low income family $3,000 a year, but at the same time lowering the risks that they have, both the health risks and the other risks from the extreme weather events that we're seeing more and more.
Mila Atmos: [00:15:54] Well, that's very powerful. To reduce your energy bill by $3,000 a year, it's a lot of money. I wanted to know a little bit about your community development. Do you have your rental unit side by side with the units that you can also sell, or do you have like whole neighborhoods? What is the community development part?
Shaun Donovan: [00:16:13] So we tend to be focused on the rental part. As I said earlier, for the lowest income people, most of them are renters. And I think what's really important about the work that we do is we have three strategic pillars for Enterprise. One is really about increasing the amount of affordable housing, but we're also very focused on racial equity, and we're very focused on upward mobility and resilience. And so we will look at what are the various ways we can provide resident services. I was recently in an after school program we run in one of our housing developments. And the incredible diversity of the kids that are living there, huge number of immigrant families, families of color with kids that were getting incredibly powerful after school programs. That's all part of the type of things that we do within our communities, because for us, it isn't just about making sure someone can afford to live in a place today. It's about what's the future for them? How do we create a future for the children, especially living in our communities, one that makes sure they are not going to have to live in affordable housing their whole lives so they can get access to whichever communities they want to live in, and to be able to build wealth in many different ways.
Mila Atmos: [00:17:37] We're taking a short break to hear about our sponsor, Shopify, and we'll be back with Shaun Donovan shortly. But first...
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And now let's return to my conversation with Shaun Donovan.
So part of your organization is Solutions, which I understand to mean that you work in collaboration with local partners on policy and on systems change. What kind of systems change do you think is most necessary in this moment? And then what are the public policy ideas that you think are most promising to get us there?
Shaun Donovan: [00:20:09] Well, right now, given the scale of the challenges that we have, I think there is an opportunity to create systems change at a scale we haven't seen. And, you know, my old boss, Barack Obama, used to say a crisis is a terrible thing, but it's also a terrible thing to waste. And I do think the fact that housing has now become a challenge everywhere in this country, and that more and more people believe that there needs to be systems change, that we need to approach this in a different way. There is an opportunity to build at the federal level, but also at the state and local level, new solutions and policy change. One of the things that I think is most powerful is an increasing understanding that we're just not building enough housing, and that barriers that stand in the way are outdated zoning codes, many of them racially and economically directed, where communities don't want low income people living there and have resisted the ability to have denser housing, more affordable housing. And we're really seeing that start to change. Zoning is generally controlled at the local level.
We're seeing states and local communities stand up and say we're going to create what's called inclusionary zoning rather than exclusionary zoning. That means when you build a new building, you could allow it to be a bigger building, but require, for example, that 20 or 30 or 40% of the housing has to be affordable housing. We're seeing more and more communities look at places where there are subway or train stops and saying, because of the access to jobs that you get from a transit stop, we ought to be building bigger buildings there. And so they're up-zoning. And we've also seen a lot of places say, why does it take 3 or 5 years to build an apartment building? Why are we subjecting many of these processes to build new housing, to unending meetings and requirements that end up standing in the way of creating housing, making it much more expensive or just eliminating it altogether? And so states like California and traditionally blue states, but also you see red states like Florida and Georgia and others that are coming together across very different political lines, housing activists, advocates for racial justice, combining with builders and private sector organizations, saying the lack of housing is really standing in the way of the future of our communities. And I think that really is bigger picture. More and more places around the country are not able to attract the workers that they need. We now have studies showing that GDP growth in large parts of our country is slowing down because of housing affordability challenges, and so people are seeing that housing isn't just a moral issue or an issue of justice for low income people. It's a larger challenge for our society in a way that I think you're starting to see kind of political strange bedfellows come together and start to make change at a systems level that is really different. And that's that's what we do at Enterprise. The solutions part of it is actually creating new policy that is really going to make systems change.
Mila Atmos: [00:23:35] So what's a gold standard for you or what's an area where you're like, wow, they're doing it right. Like that's where we should be living or that's how we should be living.
Shaun Donovan: [00:23:43] Well, what I would say is, I wish there were a nirvana for housing somewhere in the country. I've been working on this a long time, and and I think lots of places have really interesting pieces of this. Just to give you an example, the city of Minneapolis recently eliminated single family zoning.
Mila Atmos: [00:24:03] Eliminated?
Shaun Donovan: [00:24:04] Eliminated it.
Mila Atmos: [00:24:05] Wow.
Shaun Donovan: [00:24:06] First place in the country to do that. And that has started to make real change. But there are also more incremental ways that people are taking this on. Part of the problem here is, the perception is when you hear affordable housing or you think about zoning changes, you're imagining you live in a single family home and there's going to be a 20 story building next door to you. That's not really the way it works. One of the exciting things is starting to happen in many communities is a really wonky sounding name, which is accessory dwelling units, ADUs. Basically that's like a granny flat in the backyard. If you have a single family home, you can build a garage with an apartment above it. And you can go from one unit of housing on a parcel to two. That effectively could double the amount of housing you have in a community, but in a way that doesn't really change the look of the community that much, or create challenges in a way that some people perceive when you start to talk about these issues. So that's been a big policy change that we've started to see in Los Angeles. It's been tens of thousands of new units that are can be created through that. That's true even here in New York City, where we have many, many communities that are single family homes and lower density. So there are lots of different strategies that depend on where you're living. In some places, it's going to be much denser, taller buildings. In others it's going to look different. But the fundamental issue is understanding that we have millions of people who don't have an affordable place to live, because we're just not building enough housing in the country.
Mila Atmos: [00:25:43] I'm curious about your thoughts on the intersection of housing and democracy. You know, it just is something that's a basic need that everybody must meet. You have to live somewhere. And since we are a pro-democracy podcast, we think a lot about the Commons. Why is it important for a democratic society that everyone ought to be housed?
Shaun Donovan: [00:26:09] Well, I will say, for me, housing is a moral issue because it is one of our basic needs. And if you don't have a decent place to live, if you don't have a stable and affordable place to live, it is really hard to be a part of our democratic
society in fundamental ways. Think about a child who's living in a homeless shelter or moving from couch to couch with relatives. Think about the challenge. We saw them during Covid. The ability even to learn remotely. So many other things that are really hard to do. Hard to hold down a good job, if your housing isn't stable. I do think there is a fundamental threshold of participation in our democratic society that requires housing to be kind of platform or a foundation for that. And I will say in in a country where it is an entitlement to get food assistance or to get assistance with health care, every child has the right to go to public school. Only one out of five low income people in this country that is eligible on an income basis actually gets housing assistance. 20% get it. We need to have a fundamental conversation about housing, whether you call it a right or say that everybody should get some assistance, who needs it... So that's the first thing I would say. The second is that given the levels of particularly street homelessness that we're seeing in this country now, I hear more and more from people that they are questioning the ability of our democratic form of government to work. People are asking, what is happening with my tax dollars? Is government actually functioning? Because homelessness is the sort of tip of the iceberg of all of our social challenges in this country, and it is visible to people in a way that so many other of our social challenges aren't. It is, in many places, I think, starting to undermine the belief in our government and the ability of our democratic form of government to function if we can't do the basics to help people find a place to live. And then the last thing I would say about this is one of the things that we're seeing is more and more segregation along economic lines. And as our politics have become more skewed across education and income levels and economic levels. People are living with people like themselves. Wealthier people with wealthier people. Democrats with Democrats. Republicans with Republicans. And one of the things that I think is fundamentally contributing to the polarization that we're seeing in our country, the lack of a civic engagement with people that are different from yourself is because housing affordability challenges are increasing, not just our political polarization, but our geographic polarization, that it is harder and harder for a low income person, a person without a college degree to live in in many places, and that stratification and that polarization is compounding the challenges to our democracy in a way that I don't think we talk about enough. Most people will say, "look, it's Facebook. It's all of the kind of online ways that we're living in bubbles." But we're actually living in geographic bubbles. So I really worry about that because at the end of the day, what is the best way to change how people perceive people that are different from themselves? It's to have lived experience with them. It's for your kids to go to school with people that
are different from themselves. It's for you to run in the grocery store or the post office or wherever it might be. Somebody who has a different life experience and can begin to change your views about what the other is in this country. And I think our democratic ideals, if we can't respect difference in this country, it's going to be hard for our democracy to survive.
Mila Atmos: [00:30:24] Well said. Well, what is Enterprise doing when it comes to homelessness? Because people who are homeless really just can't afford housing. I read a long article last summer about a man, his wife, and their daughter who were living in their camper van because all they could afford in rent -- and I thought this was not a ridiculous number -- they could afford $1,400 in rent in Maine, and they could not find an apartment for $1,400. And so they lived in this camper van in a parking lot in front of Cabela's, and the wife and the daughter worked full time. The husband/father was in construction and had become disabled, but he was older. He was probably close to 70 years old and also had cancer. And I thought to myself, "My God, $1,400 is not nothing. It's not, I can afford 250." So tell me about the things that you're doing at Enterprise to reach those people.
Shaun Donovan: [00:31:22] Yeah, so you are so right that homelessness is a housing problem for too many people. The perception is, well, it's an issue of substance abuse or it's an issue of mental health. And certainly there is an interaction of those issues with homelessness, particularly what we call chronic homelessness or street homelessness. But most of the homeless live in shelters or live doubled up somewhere, and it is not an issue of anything but the inability to afford a decent place to live. And that is the primary driver of the big increase in homelessness that we've seen in this country. So what do we do at Enterprise? Well, we obviously solve the affordable housing issue. We build and we preserve as much affordable housing as we can. We're actually approaching, believe it or not, 1 million affordable homes that we've built or preserved over our 40 year history. That is enormously important. We're not doctors at Enterprise. We're not direct service providers. As I said earlier, we do provide after school programs and other resident services, but the kind of more intense services that are needed, particularly for those who are struggling with mental health or substance abuse, that's not our strength. But what we do do is partner with other organizations that do that. So we build an enormous amount of what's called supportive housing. Supportive housing is basically housing with on-site services that help stabilize the lives, particularly of the chronically
homeless. And it works incredibly well. This is one of the things I will say that's really frustrating to me. When I was HUD secretary, I led the national strategy on homelessness and we made enormous progress. We cut family and chronic homelessness by about a third. We cut veterans homelessness in half. Nationally, during the Obama administration, we had over 100 cities and states that ended veteran homelessness, not reduced it, but ended it. We know that solving homelessness is possible if you have the will and the investment in doing it, and you have the right strategies locally and the primary strategy. Is this supportive housing, especially for those who are living on the streets or have the most intense needs? And so in addition to just more affordable housing, which helps families at risk of homelessness not fall into homelessness, we also do provide a lot of supportive housing, working with community organizations that know how to provide the services part of the equation, and that has been a huge part of where we have made progress on homelessness in the past.
Mila Atmos: [00:34:15] That's super exciting that you have eliminated homelessness in 100 cities. That's huge. Give us one name of one of the 100 cities.
Shaun Donovan: [00:34:23] So just to be clear, this was a challenge on veterans homelessness.
Mila Atmos: [00:34:26] Yes. Only veterans. I got that.
Shaun Donovan: [00:34:27] When President Obama came into office, a veteran was twice as likely to be homeless as somebody else in our country. Think about that. Twice as likely. We put together this strategy. You know, mayors can be competitive. So we created a competition that said, let's see who can be the first to get to ending veteran homelessness. We had a great champion in Michelle Obama, who personally called many of these mayors and challenged them to do this. And what we saw was over 100 cities and states. We saw Salt Lake City in Utah. We saw Phoenix, Arizona. We saw New Orleans, Louisiana. And many, many others get there early on, and inspire others to show that it could be done. And just going back to something I said earlier, my worry today is that most people think this is a "not a solvable" problem. They look at a neighbor sleeping on the streets and think they're always going to be with us, that there isn't a way to to solve this problem, and it's just not true. And so seeing examples like
that, showing that it can be done, I think is an enormously important part of what enterprise can do right now and what we all can do right now.
Mila Atmos: [00:35:45] So speaking of what we can all do, what are two things an everyday person can do to make home and community places of pride, power and belonging?
Shaun Donovan: [00:35:55] Well, my own story of how I got involved is as a kid growing up in New York City during the first big wave of homelessness that we saw in this city, the huge increases in the 60s and 70s and early 80s was seeing more and more of my neighbors living on the street and asking myself, in the wealthiest city and the wealthiest country on Earth, how is it that we allow our neighbors to sleep on the streets? And it made me start asking questions. Is this a solvable problem? What can I do about it? And so when I went to college, I started volunteering in a homeless shelter. So one of the things I would say is if you're wondering where you can make a difference, try to change one person's life. Just be there to serve a meal, to talk to a person who's struggling with homelessness because you can hopefully help change their lives. But, and I say this from personal experience, it changed my life. It helped me to understand that homelessness is not some distant thing that only affects a small part of our country. I have friends who have children who have fallen into homelessness. Having worked with many, many people who will tell you the story that you talked about just a moment ago, a family that three of them are working jobs and still can't afford a place to live, and so they're living in their car or a van. Understanding those stories, I think, is a gateway, is a window opening into what's happening around housing challenges more broadly, and can help open that door to understanding these challenges and to building bridges to people who are different from you, but not so different after all. So that's one thing I would say. The other I would say is get involved in your community. Obviously, voting is enormously important. Vote for things like inclusionary zoning or making more housing affordable. Go to a zoning board meeting. And instead of being one of those people who's saying we don't want any new housing in our community, say yes; be a yimby, as we say. Yes in my backyard! And that, for me is also very personal. When I started working on these issues, I started volunteering at the homeless shelter. The next step for me was understanding exactly the same inspiration that Jim Rouse had when he started Enterprise Community Partners, meeting leaders in their communities who were standing up and saying, we have a
vision for our community. We want more affordable housing. We want to rebuild. Often the devastation of after riots in the 60s and 70s came together and formed community plans to build more housing. Those local leaders inspired many people in their communities to get active to be part of community development organizations and others that could really say, here's what we want our community to look like, here's how we want it to be different. And so voting is a piece of that. But there's a much broader way to be a participant in your community to help drive change in ways that often these community development organizations can be a powerful change agent for and to make more affordable housing possible.
Mila Atmos: [00:39:16] Mm hmm. Good advice. So you've been in the space for 30 years, and you keep getting up and going back to it, looking into the future, what makes you hopeful?
Shaun Donovan: [00:39:26] Well, the opportunity in crisis that President Obama used to talk about all the time makes me hopeful. It makes me concerned to see the depth of the challenges. But when I see communities across the political spectrum coming together to say it shouldn't take five years to build a new building in our community, we shouldn't stop the ability to build affordable housing in our community. In fact, we should welcome it. And we should understand that our community can't grow, can't be the type of community we want it to be without a diverse group of people. I remember early on in my work in housing, there was a local ad I saw in a magazine of a nurse that said, "she can save your child's life, but she can't be your neighbor." It's that understanding that more and more our communities are becoming places where the folks we need to make our communities work, can't live. That is starting to change people's minds. And I do think across the political spectrum, across different kinds of states in our country, we are seeing those partnerships come together and raise their voices and say, we need change. That makes me optimistic. And then, as the father of a 24 year old and a 21 year old who give me a hard time all the time about the planet that we are leaving them, I see a generation that is demanding change on on the climate in a way that makes me hopeful. You know, we complain about the dysfunction in our Congress, but over the last few years, we've passed basically a new New Deal in this country. We have $4 trillion of investment that we've made available for climate change, for investing in infrastructure, for the kinds of things that most people in this country agree on. And that makes me optimistic. If we can put it together in the right way and put it to work,
enterprise is doing exactly that. We're trying to make sure that that money goes into low income communities, that everyone can benefit from this climate transition. I think there's a real risk that if we don't do the right things, that wealthier people and wealthier communities will be driving electric cars, they'll be paying a lot less for energy ten years from now, and they won't have pollution in their communities. But low income communities will get left behind. I think we have a real opportunity. It makes me optimistic to see the potential for what we can do to bring the benefits of this climate transition to every community. That's an opportunity we didn't have just a few years ago.
Mila Atmos: [00:42:23] Yeah, that makes me hopeful, too. Well, Shaun, thank you so much for joining us on Future Hindsight. It was really a pleasure to have you on the show.
Shaun Donovan: [00:42:31] I loved being here. Thanks for having me.
Mila Atmos: [00:42:33] Shaun Donovan is the CEO and president of Enterprise Community Partners. He has served in President Obama's cabinet as secretary of the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, as well as director of the US Office of Management and Budget. He also served as Commissioner of the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development in the Bloomberg administration.
Next week on Future Hindsight, we're joined by Dr. Juliet Hooker. Her new book is Black Grief/White Grievance, which explores how race shapes expectations about whose losses matter. That's next time on Future Hindsight.
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This episode was produced by Zack Travis and me. Until next time, stay engaged! The Democracy Group: [00:43:51] This podcast is part of the Democracy Group.