While the battles continue to rage fiercely over headline issues such as health care, energy and financial system reform, the Obama Administration is also setting its priorities on policy and programs that don’t show up in the headlines every day, but are nonetheless important for the future development of our communities. 

When it comes to community and economic development, the Administration has so far jumped into the thicket of hundreds of federal programs (and more than $180 billion annually, funding everything from inner city community centers to revolving loan funds and rural broadband) with some well-established principles and a refreshing stated willingness to flip over the established order of some highly entrenched interests.

Let’s take a closer look at some of the early policy statements from the Administration (principally Adolfo Carrión Jr., the Director of Urban Policy Affairs in the White House) on these programs:

All Federal investments in community and economic development will be based on local planning undertaken on a regional basis.  There’s nothing radical or new in that principle, but most everyone recognizes by now that collaborative regional planning, unbounded by political jurisdiction, is the key to leverage economic and community development investments for most effective results.

The most effective regional development strategies reflect full integration of all of the “systems” that make a community livable.  Transportation, economy, environment, housing, education, workforce, health, culture and more — for decades, communities and the government programs that support them have pursued development of these systems in segregated silos, as though they operated independently without any effect on the other.  Over the last 15 years, however, the most effective development projects have busted those silos.  It’s good to see the Administration embrace systems thinking.

Government community and economic programs must, like the communities they support, break free of their own programmatic, regulatory and jurisdictional silos.  Now we’re getting into important new territory.  Federal programs that nominally aim to serve the same greater good have become notoriously effective at cultivating and protecting their own turf, often at the expense of the communities they are intended to serve.  I’ve witnessed firsthand fierce, expensive and time-consuming battles between federal agencies over whose regulations govern the funding of various projects.  Believe me, the bureaucratic in-fighting would make even Kafka shudder.  If the new Administration can enable meaningful, measurable communication, collaboration – and yes, consolidation – among the panoply of federal economic and community development programs, that alone will represent a milestone accomplishment.

The Administration is also rolling out the Partnership on Sustainable Communities, an interagency collaboration among the Department of Transportation, the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Environmental Protection Agency.  The highly-publicized partnership, which took on its current form in June, lists six integrated livability principles by which all communities should plan and develop.

The Partnership is still in its early stages, and there are indications that it may encompass even more Cabinet agencies – Education, Health and Human Services, Commerce, even the Justice Department.

The first real opportunity for evaluation of the Partnership will come when the Administration releases its FY 2011 budget proposal next February.  That’s when all will be able to see how much funding and what types of projects the Administration is willing to propose for the Partnership’s implementation.  Even after the budget translates into real funding, all will be for naught if the planning does not implement projects that manifest the Partnership’s principles.¹   After all, the strengths and weaknesses of a plan (including any community or regional planning process) become clear only through its implementation.

The Administration has also developed a distinctive, consultative style.  It has eagerly sought input from all quarters, and it may make that input part of the funding process through a sort of reverse RFP – “give us your good ideas and we’ll fund them,” as Carrión puts it.

Finally, the Administration may be ready to “retool” HUD’s Community Development Block Grant program, the 35 year-old, $4.5 billion formula-based Holy Grail of community development funding.  One alternative under consideration would make the program competitive rather than formula-based.  In the world of community development, this change would be roughly equivalent to moving Christmas to the second week in July.  When the Bush Administration proposed its own retooling of CDBG, as one friend of mine put it, the idea went over as well as Barbra Streisand at an NRA convention.

Community economic development may be below the political radar screen right now, but the Obama Administration is certainly moving out on a number of different initiatives in this space.  While it’s early, several of these initiatives could be very important down the road for CSR and community development practitioners, so I’d encourage you to follow their progress closely.

¹ I owe credit to my colleague Steven Bandolik for raising this point in our discussions on the Partnership.