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December 13, 2008
Green HUD
by Lee Stranahan
Barack Obama has named Shaun Donovan to head the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Donovan is a former Clinton aide, New York City's Department of Housing Preservation and Development Commissioner and a Harvard-educated architect. He's known for affordable housing.
But it didn't take much research to find that he's helped implement sustainable, green affordable housing. I'm kind of an architecture and design geek and so this PDF about the South Bronx Morrisania Homes is neat to me, with it's stats about an 100% Energy Star Appliance rating.
It's always been frustrating seeing the rabbit hutches that were synonymous with 'public housing' for years because it's so obvious that it could be done so much better. So, also in my Donovan research I was glad to see another interest of mine - community gardens - were preserved. Inner-city gardens are f-cking awesome.
HPD worked together with Council Member Helen Foster and neighborhood organizations to preserve a community garden on the designated property, and to relocate two additional gardens to an alternative site.
That's who our President-Elect is putting in place. Architects at HUD. Scientists at the Department of Energy. Hot damn!
Filed under: Awesome || Barack Obama
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Posted By Lee Stranahan | December 13, 2008 11:05 AM
Comments
This is terrible!
People running departments who actually have qualifications?
I suppose this guy Donovan guy doesn't know squat about Arabian horses, either!
It's an outrage, I tell ya!
Posted by: PackyJ at December 13, 2008 11:47 AM
Amen! Community gardens are a really cool thing!
Living in former E. Germany, I've become familiar with the Schreber garden tradition- similar to allotment gardening in many other parts of Europe- which have supported critical food production in the past and now serve a recreational function. When you take a train ride around here you'll see that the cities are bordered with these plots. I wish I had one myself, but for now I'm making do with the balcony.
My father caught on too, and got his hands on a plot within the Patterson Park in downtown Baltimore. It's certainly a place where like-minded people are enjoying a pasttime, but it sure would be nice to see this kind of thing take on a whole new importance within a movement away from suburban sprawl towards smarter greener development.
Posted by: Dan in DE at December 13, 2008 12:01 PM
Why, it's an outrage! Usin' MY tax moneh to support gardening! And I don't care about no dee-zine! Them poor folks don't wanna work, they can live in cardboard boxes fer all I care! Dee-zine... (haughty laughter) Jes' purls before swine, I tell yas. The gummint gonna give away my moneh to dee-zine-urs for public housing only when they pry it from my cold, dead hands!
On second thought, let them lazy shiftless folks have the gardens and grow their own food. Maybe then we can stop givin' out alla them food stamps.
Posted by: Matt Osborne at December 13, 2008 1:43 PM
Having grown up in a NYC Housing Authority middle income Project, I am very well aware of the concrete prisons that these things were when they became so prevalent back in the 1950's. What remains of most of them today is just older versions of the same concrete prisons with no redeeming characteristics. Even time and the growing landscapes cannot erase what these projects represented and what they continue to represent. They remain a stigma for people who cannot afford to live anywhere else. At least if these places were made to seem unique and friendly, the people that live there may actually care enough to keep their homes neat and clean.
It is so nice to know that we will once again be governed by adults acting as such.
Posted by: willpen at December 13, 2008 8:02 PM
