Office of Urban Affairs
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Latest Blog Posts

  • January 10, 2012 at 5:49 PM EST

    Building Neighborhoods of Opportunity

    Choice Neighborhood Grants provide local leaders with flexible funds to transform high-poverty neighborhoods with distressed public housing into sustainable communities with mixed-income housing, safe streets, and economic opportunity.

  • December 30, 2011 at 1:38 PM EST

    Improving Affordable Housing Delivery Across Federal Agencies

    The initiatives in a new report will streamline federal housing requirements to support more efficient delivery of affordable housing, and help state and federal agencies’ staff to better serve low-income families who rent their homes.

  • December 2, 2011 at 12:23 PM EST

    Strong Cities, Strong Communities Fellowship Program

    Strong Cities, Strong Communities Initiative Fellows will be placed in cities around the country and trained to help with local economic revitalization efforts.

  • November 29, 2011 at 12:46 PM EST

    Ending Homelessness in New Orleans

    New Orleans unveils a new plan to end homelessness in the city, developed with the help of the Obama Administration's Strong Cities, Strong Communities initiative.

  • November 16, 2011 at 12:51 PM EST

    Pilot Project Aims to Streamline Government Policies for Affordable Housing Developers

    Two states sign on to a pilot project that helps reduce regulatory burdens on developers of federally subsidized affordable rental housing.

  • July 27, 2011 at 11:58 AM EST

    Federal Rental Alignment

    The White House Domestic Policy Council (DPC) announces new programs that will better serve low-income families who rent from programs administered by the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

  • July 5, 2011 at 11:37 AM EST

    Obama Administration Announces New Grants to Support Community Development

    Derek Douglas, Special Assistant to the President for Urban Affairs in the White House Domestic Policy Council, describes new capacity-building grants that will help neighborhoods develop and execute on their visions for growth and ensure that investments in the community are made strategically to maximize impact.

  • June 24, 2011 at 1:12 PM EST

    Announcing the Urban Waters Federal Partnership: Helping Communities Revitalize Their Local Waters through Increased Federal Collaboration

    Melody Barnes, along with U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson and U.S. Department of Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, Senator Ben Cardin, and local city partners announce a new federal partnership to reconnect urban communities with their waterways by improving coordination among federal agencies and collaborating with community-led revitalization efforts.

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INITIATIVES

Urban PolicyWorking Group

The Urban Policy Working Groups focus on initiatives that not only build on Administration priorities, but also embody a holistic and integrated approach to urban policy. These proposed initiatives recognize that our national urban policy should be flexible enough to adapt to (and indeed should strengthen the connection between) the multiple geographic scales -- neighborhood, city, and metropolitan -- at which leaders act to address increasingly complex challenges.

Urban Tour

The Urban Tour is an important illustration of the Administration’s commitment to Urban and Metropolitan America, and reflects the Administration’s bottom-up approach to reshaping the Federal-urban partnership. The tour approaches urban-metro regions as assets, and highlights innovations that are interdisciplinary and that are to the benefit of entire regions.