NEW YORK — Shaun Donovan, the New York official Barack Obama chose to lead the Department of Housing and Urban Development, has hands-on experience with an issue important to the president-elect: affordable housing.
As commissioner of the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development, Donovan, 42, has received widespread acclaim for his leadership of an effort to add 165,000 reasonably priced homes to New York’s ultra-expensive housing stock by 2013.
The $7.5 billion program has favored an approach that eschews heavy taxpayer spending on big, bleak government housing projects.
Instead, the city has favored using various tools to help finance smaller, mixed-income developments built by private investors or nonprofit groups. Many of those plans have relied on leveraging smaller amounts of public dollars into much bigger investments by others.
Andrew Cuomo, New York’s attorney general, issued a statement saying, “Secretary-nominee Donovan has a tremendous record of public service, integrity and strong leadership skills, and is the right choice to advance the Department of Housing and Urban Development under the Obama administration.”
A Harvard-educated native New Yorker with master’s degrees in public administration and architecture, Donovan has worked as an architect in New York and in Italy. He was an assistant secretary for multifamily housing at HUD during the Clinton administration, and then a visiting scholar at New York University.
Donovan was appointed to head New York City’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development in 2004.
As commissioner, Donovan spearheaded initiatives to tackle the subprime and foreclosure crisis. He ran a city homeownership plan that, in contrast with others across the country, kept foreclosures low; of more than 17,000 new or preserved homes under this plan, only five owners have lost their properties to foreclosure.
