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Senator Brown on Livable Communities Act

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Started 1 year ago by Andrew Hall
Latest reply from HeySquare

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Andrew Hall
Dennison Place (The Circles)
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Senator Brown on Livable Communities Act

Excerpt :

This week the Senate Banking Committte, on which I serve, passed the Livable Communities Act of 2010. This legislation would provide communities with resources to help reshape themselves for the 21st century. It is not a one-size-fits all approach. By empowering local and regional planning, the Act would help communities promote sustainable economic development and better coordinate local, state, and federal housing, transportation, and housing programs, while saving taxpayer dollars.

A.

Posted 1 year ago #
kellisc
Italian Village
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Wow... I am impressed. Now, what will they actually spend their money on?

Posted 1 year ago #
Andrew Hall
Dennison Place (The Circles)
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That is the real rub. I do like the idea of creating a framework with an overall philosophy and leaving implementation more flexible, but that is obviously a recipe for abuse as well. I don't have a lot of faith in the current executive branch to make this anything more than political payoffs, alas.

A.

Posted 1 year ago #
HeySquare
German Village
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This looks... awesome. It could pay for highway caps, programs to incentivize infill development, rail... anything. wow. And I can see that it might replace other programs that are difficult to use.

Posted 1 year ago #
Mercurius
First Avenue
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Andrew Hall wrote >>
That is the real rub. I do like the idea of creating a framework with an overall philosophy and leaving implementation more flexible, but that is obviously a recipe for abuse as well. I don't have a lot of faith in the current executive branch to make this anything more than political payoffs, alas.
A.

Here is some detail on the Bill and the actual legislation.
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d111:s.01619:

First and most importantly, it looks like it has yet to pass the House committee and has little chance of passing before the expiration of the 111th Congress. With Dodd as the Chairman of the committee and title sponsor of the legislation, he could have moved it earlier if it was a top priority. Unless introduced again and passed early in the 112th Congress, I see this as little more than lip service to campaign in their urban sectors- time will tell.

Basically this bill sets up a new department within HUD named the Office of Sustainable Housing and Communities. This department would do little more than review and issue grants on a broad concept of "livability." While good, I'll wait to see first if this thing ever passes and second how much is appropriated to this department for grants.

Good of Brown to take a stance. Here is his testimony.

Posted 1 year ago #
Andrew Hall
Dennison Place (The Circles)
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@mercurius Yes, I was cart-before-horsing. At least lawmakers are thinking in terms of this framework as guidance for funding. It gives one some hope.

A.

Posted 1 year ago #
gramarye
In Exile
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The devil, as always, will be in the details. "Livable Communities" just doesn't have enough universally-agreed content to have much meaning as a guiding principle for regulating activities or expending resources. (After all, who really wants to live in an "unlivable community?")

Posted 1 year ago #
HeySquare
German Village
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gramarye wrote >>
The devil, as always, will be in the details. "Livable Communities" just doesn't have enough universally-agreed content to have much meaning as a guiding principle for regulating activities or expending resources. (After all, who really wants to live in an "unlivable community?")

I took a look at the text of the legislation, http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c111:S.1619:
and it basically has a component for 1) establishing an office and a council for sustainable communities, 2) a grant program for planning activities, and 3)a grant program for funding projects. I think it is a good approach to estabish this holistically, but I thought the grant program for funding projects was the most exciting. If they set up a scoring system based on the program goals, I think such a program would have both tremendous lattitude to fund innovative projects. It is often hard to fund unusual projects, because they don't necessarily fit as typical "transportation" projects or "housing" projects.

For example, something innovative like the highway caps are traditionally kind of hard to fund under a pure transportation heading, since they don't really score points for safety or adding capicity. But under a livable communities grant, it would score for pedestrian improvements, economic development, infill, etc. Such a grant could potentially fund a lot of the projects that slip through the cracks these days. I also like it because the urban development funds are often targeted for just that... urban development, and rural areas are out of luck. But these funds would have no such narrow target ranges, and could conceivably be used by small as well as large communities.

Posted 1 year ago #

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