EPA, Transportation, Housing Departments Launch Sustainable Communities Partnership
At a June 16 hearing before the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, and Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan said the three agencies have formed an interagency “Partnership for Sustainable Communities.”
The partnership builds on a joint effort between Transportation and Housing and Urban Development announced in March (53 DEN A-5, 3/23/09. With the addition of EPA, the new interagency partnership will advance policies to improve access to affordable housing, provide more transportation options, and lower transportation costs while also protecting the environment in communities across the country.
Those partnership focus includes:
• developing safe, reliable, and economical transportation choices to cut household transportation costs, to reduce the nation's dependence on foreign oil, to improve air quality, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and to promote public health;
• expanding location- and energy-efficient housing choices for people of all ages, incomes, races, and ethnic groups to increase mobility and to reduce the combined cost of housing and transportation;
• improving economic competitiveness with reliable and timely access to employment centers, educational opportunities, and other services for workers as well as expanded business access to markets;
• targeted federal funding using strategies such as transit-oriented, mixed-use development and land recycling to increase community revitalization, to improve the efficiency of public works investments, and to safeguard rural landscapes;
• coordinating policies and leveraging investments to increase the accountability and effectiveness of government to plan for future growth, including making smart energy choices such as locally generated renewable energy; and
• investing in healthy, safe, and walkable neighborhoods—rural, urban or suburban.
More information on the interagency Partnership for Sustainable Communities is available from EPA at http://www.epa.gov/opei/ocmp/dced-partnership.html.
Written testimony and a video archive of the Senate Banking Committee hearing may be accessed at http://banking.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Hearings.Home.
