HUD announces the Sustainable Communities Regional Planning Grant Program

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has announced that it will award $100 million in grants as part of its new Sustainable Communities Regional Planning Grant Program.  This program is designed to create stronger, more sustainable communities by connecting housing to jobs, fostering local innovation, and building a clean energy economy.

The objective of the Sustainable Communities Initiative is to stimulate more integrated and sophisticated regional planning to guide state, metropolitan, and local investments in land use, transportation and housing, as well as to challenge localities to undertake zoning and land use reforms.  This Initiative has four main tasks:

• First, the office partners with our counterparts in the Department of Transportation (DOT) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to offer Sustainable Communities Planning Grants. Through this partnership we seek to catalyze a new generation of integrated metropolitan transportation, housing, land use and energy planning, using state of the art data, analytic tools and Geographic Information Systems.
• Second, the Initiative funds Sustainable Communities Challenge Grants to provide a local complement to the regional planning initiative, enabling multi-jurisdictional partnerships to establish policies, codes, tools and critical capital investments needed to achieve sustainable and inclusive development.
• Third, the Initiative supports capacity-building and a clearinghouse designed to support both grant recipients, as well as other communities interested in implementing sustainable community strategies.
  
• Finally, the Initiative provides funding for a joint HUD-DOT-EPA research effort designed to advance transportation and housing linkages on a number of levels.

This grant program builds on the Interagency Partnership for Sustainable Communities, an innovative interagency collaboration, launched by President Obama in June 2009, between DOT, HUD, and EPA to provide more sustainable housing and transportation choices for families and lay the foundation for a 21st-century economy.

For more information, visit the HUD RFP Web site. Deadline: August 23, 2010.