U.S. President-elect Barack Obama nominated Shaun Donovan to be Secretary of Housing and Urban Development where he’ll spearhead efforts to increase home ownership among Americans with lower incomes and help citizens hit by the recession to keep their properties.
Shaun Donovan (born January 24, 1966) is the current head of the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development. Today on December 13, 2008, President-elect Barack Obama announced that he would appoint him to his cabinet, to head the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Born in New York, Donovan earned undergraduate and graduate degrees from Harvard University, studying public administration at the John F. Kennedy School of Government and architecture at the Graduate School of Design.
During the Clinton administration and the transition to the Bush administration, Donovan was Deputy Assistant Secretary for Multifamily Housing at HUD, and was acting FHA commisioner. He became New York City’s housing commissioner in 2004.
“Expanding access to affordable housing isn’t just about caring for the least fortunate among us and strengthening our middle class,” Obama said today in his weekly radio address in which he announced the nomination. “It’s about ending our housing mess, climbing out of our financial crisis, and putting our economy on the path to long-term growth and prosperity.”
Obama said he would develop plans to limit foreclosures and “dramatically increase the number of families who can stay in their homes.” One tenth of U.S. families who own a home is in financial distress, Obama said.
Donovan, who trained as an architect, is currently commissioner of housing in the New York City government and served at HUD during the Clinton administration, Obama said.
Part of Donovan’s task will be to work with the Treasury Department and other federal agencies like the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation on a program to limit foreclosures, Obama said. Donovan will also be faced with promoting cities as “the backbone of regional growth,” Obama said.
Obama said that Donovan “will bring to this important post fresh thinking, unencumbered by old ideology and outdated ideas.” “He understands that we need to move past the stale arguments that say low-income Americans shouldn’t even try to own a home or that our mortgage crisis is due solely to a few greedy lenders,” AFP reports.