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Strategies for Providing Accessibility and
Visitability for HOPE VI and Mixed Finance Home-
ownership
, prepared by Urban Design Associates
provides exemplary design information (HUD,
2000). The HUD website http://www.designadvisor.org
also provides excellent advice for the design and lay-
out of affordable housing.
We have already noted the success of Charlotte’s
HOPE VI project near the city center, and this is
repeated in many cities across the nation. It’s thus
disappointing to note that at the time of writing in
2003, the administration of President George W.
Bush planned to end the whole program in October
2003 (
New Urban News
, March 2003). This inten-
tion to abandon a very successful program seems
mainly ideological. It was a program much favored
by the administration of President Clinton, and it
succeeded in large part because central government
did specify clear standards and New Urbanist design
objectives that individual cities were expected to fol-
low. But this level of federal guidance (some would
say control) of local government does not sit well
with many American politicians and citizens.
No federal urban program is as design based as
HOPE VI, but another notably effective national
initiative has been the transportation and planning
legislation entitled ISTEA (1991) and its successor,
TEA-21. ISTEA, widely pronounced as ‘iced tea,’ is
an acronym for the Intermodal Surface Transportation
Efficiency Act. The act explicitly linked land use and
transportation planning, supported planning for
public transit, highlighted the relevance of planning
for bicycles and pedestrians, and promoted the idea
of connecting all these modes in an integrated
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system. It expressly funded transportation systems
that provided alternatives to the car in cities, espe-
cially in those with bad air pollution. It also included
some money for historic preservation in situations
where historic properties were enmeshed with trans-
portation planning. In the context of minimal
regional planning, these initiatives marked a big step
forward, but there was little mention of urban design
in these considerations. This is simply not an issue
that enters into American thinking at a national level.
In American government, many policy initiatives on
a wide range of matters originate at state level, and in an
effort to improve the quality of their environment, a
few states have enacted growth management legislation
with some regulatory force. These include Hawaii in
1959, Vermont in 1970, (two of the smallest states in the
union, where pressures of development are more obvi-
ous because of their limited size) followed by Oregon in
1973, Florida in 1985, Maine and Rhode Island in
1988, Washington in 1990 and Maryland and New
Jersey in 1998. Altogether, 13 states have some form of
statewide growth management control (in 2003), but
even here results vary. In parts of these states a number
of important natural landscapes have been preserved
and some built-up areas were transformed to a more
sustainable urban form, but nearby other parts of the
environment is still visually and ecologically a mess.
One of the most effective techniques of regional
planning at state level has been used by Maryland
and New Jersey. Both states focus their spending and
tax incentives to business on communities where
adequate infrastructure is already in place to support
infill or contiguous growth rather than new green-
field development. Smart Growth strategies like this
are not designed to stop development; they simply
decide on the locations for the wisest investment of
public funds (Katz, 2003: p. 49).
Design is not a factor that looms large in the
thinking of most state governments, but an interest-
ing advisory document from the National Governors
Association, published in 2001 and entitled