Change!

 

“WASHINGTON — President-elect Barack Obama has picked the widely respected housing commissioner for New York City, Shaun Donovan, to be the secretary of housing in his cabinet.

Assuming that Mr. Donovan, 42, is confirmed by the Senate to head the Department of Housing and Urban Development, he would be returning to the agency where he worked in the Clinton administration as acting federal housing commissioner and, earlier, as deputy assistant secretary for multifamily housing, overseeing subsidies and properties for about two million families.

Mr. Donovan has experience in all facets of the affordable housing market, having worked in both the nonprofit and private sectors and in academia as a scholar of housing policy. He has even worked as an architect in New York and Italy.

With permission this year from Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who hired him in March 2004, Mr. Donovan took a leave of absence to campaign for and advise Mr. Obama’s presidential campaign. Mr. Obama named Mr. Donovan to the housing post on Saturday, in his weekly national radio address.

“Shaun Donovan has been one of the most effective housing commissioners in New York City’s history,” said Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, who had championed Mr. Donovan. “At this time, with the housing crisis raging, he is exactly the kind of person we need as HUD secretary.”

As chief of New York’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development, Mr. Donovan is in charge of the Bloomberg administration’s $7.5 billion New Housing Marketplace Plan to build or preserve 165,000 units for to low- and moderate-income families, housing up to 500,000 residents, by 2013.

Prior to his hiring by Mr. Bloomberg, Mr. Donovan was a managing director at Prudential Mortgage Capital Co., in charge of its portfolio of investments in affordable housing loans, including Fannie Mae and the Federal Housing Administration debt.”

The article doesn’t note that Donovan worked for HUD during the Clinton administration, where he ran a multibillion-dollar housing-subsidy program.

Earlier this year as the subprime mess began to unravel Donovan said:

“These are areas that have really recovered in some ways miraculously from where they were 20 to 30 years ago…”The progress we made in so many of these communities has the potential to be unraveled by what’s happening.”

New York City’s forclosure rate is far above the national average since 2004 when Donovan took over to head Mayor Boomberg’s housing initiatives.