Founded in 1974, the Office of Policy Development and Research (PD&R) provides vital information and recommendations on housing and community development issues to advance HUD's policy agenda. Its research and development projects span a broad spectrum of urban and metropolitan issues. Recently, RRR asked Xavier de Souza Briggs -- appointed by President Clinton in February 1998 to be the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Research and now Acting Assistant Secretary for Policy Development and Research -- for an update on HUD's R&D agenda and the role of HUD-funded knowledge building in a Nation changing rapidly in so many ways.

RRR: Tell us about yourself. How did you come to be interested in housing research?

XB: After college, I worked in local planning on the private side in the San Francisco Bay Area. I found the experience rich but constraining -- yearned to find more innovative, community-responsive ways to do planning and to ensure that good plans were implemented. I entered graduate school at Harvard to prepare for that work, only to discover a few wonderful mentors -- they were sociologists in education, funny enough -- who encouraged me to pursue a Ph.D. I did so at Columbia in New York City, while running a consulting practice focused on out-of-the-box community planning. I ran a big planning process in the South Bronx that taught me an awful lot, and began to write about a housing desegregation case in Yonkers for my dissertation. The theoretical and empirical work spanned social networks, housing/job market connections, geographic infor-mation system studies of public housing and property values, and more. Things took off from there. Most of my research is in urban sociology or economic sociology, but I'm no slave to the disciplines. The most exciting work is always on the borders of disciplines. I taught at the Kennedy School at Harvard before coming to HUD and have taken a 2-year leave to jump in here. I am probably more of a community development or community building person than a classic "houser," but my interests remain terrifically broad, which makes my current role a very exciting one.

RRR: What is the primary research mission of the Office of Research, Evaluation, and Monitoring (OREM)?

XB: OREM's role within PD&R is to provide reliable, objective data and analyses that lead to informed policy decisions. We want to find out what programs work and how they can work better. We also want to be out there on what I call horizon issues -- following important issues even where no HUD program exists (or yet exists). But it can't stop with pure program evaluation work. I think OREM and the other parts of PD&R really carry out three types of R&D: problem diagnosis, where we track trends in housing needs to inform policy; program evaluation, whether scientific experiments to measure impacts or docu-menting, assessment, and monitoring; and design and extension work, wherein we actually fund the incubation of new technologies or practices and then work to diffuse those practices in the world well beyond HUD. The last type of R&D enables us to function like an agricultural extension service for good policy and practice, which is very important.

RRR: How does OREM go about this?

XB: Some of the tools we use include policy conferences, quick-turnaround studies, and long-term evaluations. It's important that we work to include an ever-broadening range of perspectives and draw on the talents and insights of practitioners, advocates, industry groups, and foundations -- not just researchers. While much of our formal evaluation work is contracted through research firms, some of the most creative horizon work is bid through requests for proposals or results from cooperative agreements with other funders.

RRR: What are some of the specific areas in which OREM is conducting research?

XB: We address the range of areas outlined in HUD's major strategic objectives. Our new brochure of policy development and research priorities for 1999-2000, due out in a few weeks, will outline these areas [see HUD's Research and Development Agenda on page 3]. Some of the most important and exciting priorities are regionalism and sustainable growth, workforce development and welfare reform, housing our Nation's elders, community building through public housing redevelopment, and fair housing and fair lending -- particularly given the President's One America Initiative. HUD also leads a White House Initiative called the Partnership for Advancing Technology in Housing (PATH), which aims to make the next generation of American housing safer, more environmentally friendly, more durable and disaster resistant, and more cost effective. PATH will help building technologies diffuse more rapidly through the homebuilding industry. It's incredible how long it takes to get widespread adoption of good ideas in housing construction and repair. PATH is partnering us with many public and private players and building directly on our decades of basic research on building technology. We're even harvesting some of that technical knowledge and some of those relationships with partners to help the hurricane-affected areas of Central America and the Caribbean rebuild smarter.

RRR: What are the major HUD reports informed by PD&R research?

XB: Perhaps the most significant and widely distributed policy document produced with our help is The State of the Cities, which examines the social and economic health of America's cities and metro areas. It comes out each summer. Another eagerly anticipated publication is our annual Report to Congress on Worst Case Housing Needs.¹ Policymakers, the press, and program officials across the Nation rely on these two publications to make informed decisions and educate the public about the need for various housing, community, and economic development programs and projects.

RRR: What else lies ahead for HUD's research work?

XB: We'll move on two tracks. The first is continuing the drive by Mike Stegman and Marge Turner, my predecessors, to democratize data, making important data more widely available to interest groups and researchers. The second track is streamlining our operations to become more efficient and customer friendly. Information technology is the vehicle that will take us down these paths. We have worked hard to improve our presence on the World Wide Web² to make it easier for researchers, interest groups, and others to get and use HUD reports and program data. We have made the HUD USER bibliographic database -- which contains more than 8,000 abstracts on research studies from PD&R and many other sources -- available online. To make our research available to everyone, we are also creating a virtual library on our homepage that contains the full text of all PD&R publications. Anyone interested will be able to access our publications free of charge.

Our efforts to become more customer friendly extend to a study of HUD's 2020 Management Reform, including moni-toring the effectiveness of the Community Builders, a new national workforce of frontline HUD employees who will be the "front door" to HUD for our partners and customers, from the smallest nonprofit to the largest city or State government.