“It’s time the federal government stopped encouraging sprawl,” Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Shaun Donovan declared this morning before the Congress for the New Urbanism.

He’d announced moments before that the department would fund $3 billion worth of projects this year alone, and they’d henceforth use “location efficiency” (based on transportation access, residential density, and so on) to score grant applications. They’ll also use the criteria of LEED-ND, the brainchild of CNU, the U.S. Green Building Council, and the National Resources Defense Council, Donovan said. It was launched last month to apply the green principles of LEED to urban development.

It could turn out to be the first step in a sea

change about how the federal government approaches urbanism, which in

turn could lead to the end of sprawl. Or, to paraphrase Nixon, we are

all New Urbanists now.

The implications go beyond funding for public housing. Last year, HUD joined the Department of Transportation and the Environmental Protection Agency in creating the Interagency Partnership for Sustainable Communities, an effort to think holistically about housing, transportation, and quality of life when awarding tens of billions of dollars in federal funds.

It is an article of faith among advocates for sustainable development that the notion Americans want sprawl is a pernicious myth. Sprawl isn’t a function of market forces but the outcome of federal policies dating back to at least the 1950s. “For decades,” Donovan said, “the government encouraged sprawl” with freeway construction and a “housing finance system that perpetuated the ‘drive until you qualify’ myth.