So here is the answer. HUD and other housing agencies are used to having planners and developers (in conjunction with State Architects Office and other state level agencies) lay out the plans for how to accomplish goals and guidelines. What's missing are the ground level political advocacy groups in particular locations....the citizen experts on social policy. They have been systematically excluded in the machinery. As part of the details and specification list, is the enclusion of these people in the development, direction, and oversight process.
[The key elements were democratic management (similar to condominium associations) and prohibition to sell dwelling units - if you wanted to move out you could no sell your unit, it reverted back to the cooperative. This made it affordable and eliminated speculation.]
Exactly. Inclusion of local groups and their agency reps are essential to making these broad brush plans work in the concrete. The way to do that is to expand the federal level personnel who work in the field with these groups to develop their plans with their experience and expertise as key elements in design and implimentation.
This was why Johnson invented OEO, because the existing system was essentially closed to the ground level people doing battles. In contrast Obama's stimuluous package used the basic OFDA system, but put his projects in an adjoined index, funded and designed independent of already existing programs, because very few of those programs required business partners. The idea was to minimize the impact and channel the outcome away from government funded development. It was supposed to be seed money for private start up businesses.
Berkeley is big on developing the recycling and waste management industry so they already had `shovel ready' projects in need of funding to expand. That's where the bulk of the stimulus money went. I found that out about a month ago from my ex-wife (ex-city planner) who was on the recycling project board of directors.
CG