Tuesday, January 12, 2010

Carrion: 'We're Not The Lead Actor'

By Michelle Williams  

Adolfo Carrion Jr.

Director of the White House Office of Urban Affairs

During his campaign, Barack Obama said we "need to stop seeing our cities as the problem and start seeing them as the solution." In February, he created the White House Office of Urban Affairs. The move gave hope to cities, which have suffered federal disinterest for decades. But observers have wondered if the office will actually be effective in changing the urban and economic development landscape.

NationalJournal.com sat down with Adolfo Carrion Jr., director of the office, to discuss the accomplishments and challenges of its first year and his hopes for 2010. Edited excerpts follow.

NJ: What are some of the creative solutions to urban problems you saw on your national listening tour that might go into the national agenda?

Carrion: I think it's important to note that the president understood as a candidate, as a U.S. senator, as a local official, that innovation happens all across the country in communities that are hard at work on solving their problems. At the start of the administration, even during the transition, if you look at some of the memoranda that were floating around and the ideas that were going back and forth about how to create this office and what the focus should be, the president consistently said... innovation is happening out there. Go find it. Bring it back here so we can retool the federal programs and target our efforts correctly to support communities. We're a supporting actor. We're not the lead actor here....

We went to places like Philadelphia, Kansas City, Denver, Chicago, Los Angeles and Atlanta. For instance, in Philadelphia, they were already undertaking this pretty extensive initiative that had targeted an area of the city that was considered a food desert. [They wanted] to bring healthy food and economic opportunity and education to this area using the development of a supermarket to connect the dislocated, disconnected work force; to improve the health conditions; to connect the farming communities from the center and western part of the state; to really begin to build economies and relationships.

[In Kansas City] they identified an area of the city that had been forgotten for decades and, in fact, was the victim of bad policy in the past because they built a highway right through this six-neighborhood area, 150-block area, about 40 years ago. That's not unusual in a lot of cities around the country where a public works project cuts right through an old neighborhood and then tears it apart. I know from experience with the Cross Bronx Expressway and what it did in New York City.

But in this case, the local Congress member, the local mayor, the residents of the community all get together and say, "Look, we're going to take advantage of the Recovery Act funds. We're going to invest them to green this area, to create jobs, to improve the efficiency of the homes and to beautify this area and to begin to attract businesses. We're going to improve the transportation infrastructure and get people who live in this marginal area of the city [to] connect to the central business district and be a part of the economy." They also applied a smart grid essentially retooling the electrical grid in that area. They worked with the local power authority and were able to get people from the neighborhood to begin to be trained in utility work....

It's fascinating to see how communities over decades of national absence in support of cities have really been able to build stronger communities.

NJ: Since the July urban affairs summit, what else has the office done? What have been some of the accomplishments and challenges you've had?

Carrion: We organized the work of the office into three major policy areas that are based on three national goals that emerged from the work. One is ensuring economic competitiveness. Two is ensuring environmental responsibility and what we do as a federal government in building cities and metropolitan areas. And three is creating an environment of opportunity.

From those three national goals, we've built policy areas of work. Regional innovation clusters, which is about building stronger regional economies. Sustainable communities, which is a partnership to invest responsibly in building infrastructure that gets people and goods, builds better neighborhoods and business in an environmentally responsible way that will hand it off to future generations better than we found it. And third is the work at the neighborhood level....

It's [the president's] experience base that informs his service: that everybody goes back home to a neighborhood. And the neighborhood is that incubator, that place where no matter where you start, whether you're poor, middle-class or well-off, that neighborhood needs to nurture your promise and potential, so we need to build stronger neighborhoods.

NJ: I know that part of the progress of the initiative deals with Congress. How do you think Congress has done so far with it?

Carrion: Well, Congress is our partner, and clearly the president recognizes that Congress is our partner.... For us to build stronger cities and stronger metropolitan areas, we need a Congress that holds this as a high priority. With more than 80 percent of the people and 85 percent of the jobs in metropolitan areas and with our competitive edge and gross domestic production capacity rooted and based in metropolitan areas, Congress is the natural partner. Now what we need to do is, over the next several months, work with Congress to shape that budget that the president offers them.

NJ: On a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being excellent, how well do you think the administration has done in the area of urban affairs?

Carrion: Twelve [laughs]. You know what? For me it's easy to say it's great because I'm an urban planner, and I'm a former elected official at the local level.... You talk to mayors, county executives, local officials all across the country now, and they will tell you... it is a breath of fresh air, what's happening to urban America.

Now, here's the challenge: I think in the excitement of a new administration and a campaign, folks get so excited they think, "Oh, we're going to turn this around. We're going to elect somebody and everything is going to change overnight." One of the funniest things... it happened on television... but somebody was saying the president had been sworn in on January 20. And it was, like, the second week in February and somebody was joking, "Hey, my life hasn't changed."

Well, in fact, you know what? Change requires work. We have very limited time. The clock is ticking. We've got 35 months and 25 days left in the first term of this presidency, not that anybody's counting. We hope that we have a second opportunity to continue to provide the leadership that this country needs. But we've got to roll up our sleeves. This is a partnership. The president has always, from the start, said this is not simply about the president and the federal administration. This is a partnership with communities all across America.

NJ: What are your hopes for 2010?

Carrion: Wow. Well, besides making sure that I eat well and exercise -- my hope is that we will be able to build communities that are nurturing children, that are nurturing small businesses, that are providing opportunity for workers, that are healthier, that are more walkable and usable, more competitive cities. That's what this office is about. That's what this president is about. That's what this administration is about. I think 2010, despite all the difficulty that we're facing -- and God knows we're facing a lot of difficulty right now -- is going to be a good and important year in continuing to march toward a better America.