Andrew Trueblood (@atrueblood) is a housing, economic development, and land use professional. Between 2018 and 2021, Andrew served as the Director of the DC Office of Planning (DCOP), where he prioritized agency efforts around housing and equity. He shepherded the update of the Comprehensive Plan and led DCOP’s support of the Mayor’s housing efforts. This included a goal of 36,000 new units by 2025, with 12,000 affordable units and area-level affordable housing targets with the goal of achieving a more equitable distribution of affordable housing. Trueblood also championed regional coordination, including through his role as Chair of the Planning Directors Technical Committee at the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, where he helped formulate regional housing targets.
Episode Description
Cities are places where continuity and change co-exist. History shapes neighborhoods and the relationships between them, while economic forces can reshape a city’s landscape and skyline. In Washington D.C., the friction between continuity and change is ever present. The data and the research that goes into planning such a place is the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories, with guest Andrew Trueblood.
+Full Transcript
Rosemary Pennington
Cities are places where continuity and change coexist. History shapes neighborhoods and the relationships between them while economic forces can reshape a city's landscape or skyline in Washington DC the friction between continuity and changes ever present. The data and research that goes into planning such a place is a focus of this episode of Stats and Stories where we explore the statistics behind the stories and the stories behind the statistics. I'm Rosemary Pennington. Stats and Stories is a production of Miami University's departments of statistics and media, journalism and film, as well as the American Statistical Association. Joining me as regular panelist John Bailer, Chair of Miami statistics department. Our guest today is Andrew Trueblood, housing, economic development and land use professional. Between 2018 and 2021. Trueblood served as the director of the DC Office of Planning, or DC op, where he prioritized agency efforts around housing and equity. He shepherded the update of the comprehensive plan and lead DC GOP support of Mayor Bowser is housing efforts prior to that Trueblood was the chief of staff at DCS Office of the Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development, where he supported economic development policy and projects and created the Economic Intelligence program to improve the agency's data and analysis capacity, and provide more open and accessible data and analysis. Andrew, thank you so much for joining us today.
Andrew Trueblood
Thank you so much for having me.
Rosemary Pennington
How did you get interested in urban and city planning?
Andrew Trueblood
That is actually quite an interesting question because it gets to where I grew up, which is Las Vegas. And it's funny, I'll say I still have a Las Vegas area code on my cell phone. So people oftentimes think that I am spam when I'm calling them. But so you know, I grew up, you know, being somebody under 21, in a place like Las Vegas really gets you wondering what makes a place and who it's for. And when I went to college, I came out east to go to Princeton, and I saw these really vibrant, interesting, wonderful places all over. And it really got me interested in the kind of nexus between places and people and cities. So that's what I studied and how I came down to Washington.
John Bailer
I love that definition. What makes a place and who is it for? That's really, that's a great picture that's painted by that. So thanks for that. Now, all of a sudden, I'm thinking about where we live, you know, kind of what that means in terms of how we think about our future. I was really intrigued and thinking about just the issues that surface when you're when urban city planning is considered. And I you know, I was looking at one of the sets of slides you had produced for a talk you were given where you were talking about both systems and scales. And you know, part of what was mentioned in Rosemarys, introduction was touching on particularly the housing dimension as one of the systems of interest. And then there's this intersection of the scale being a city, I was wondering if you could just kind of a little bit of a flyover of some of the other aspects of both systems and scales that you had to consider as part of your work.
Andrew Trueblood
Certainly, well, that side that you're looking at is one that we developed when I was at the Office of Planning. In many respects, it's hard to define planning for people, you know that a lot of people think it might just be zoning or approving permits for buildings. And we use this as a way to help clarify, when we think about a comprehensive plan, what does that mean, and we know we have various systems. And those you mentioned, housing is one and thinking of housing as a system was really an important driver of a lot of the policy work. But there's other systems, we think of transportation naturally as a system, but also environmental and Open Space Systems, also food and health systems and a lot of, you know, a lot of work around health and health equity and the social determinants of health, also education, economic, cultural systems. And when we think about questions of displacement, all of these are really critical systems and most of them are made up of people. I want to be clear, and that's where we think about scales, really starting at the individual because we experience each of these systems. We experience them not only for ourselves, but our household in our family, also our block and our neighborhood, our broader community and our city and our county and state and all the way up to the nation and even the globe. And so many of these questions that we face in cities, but any in any place are about understanding Funding how it plays out at different levels. And housing is a great example of that. And we had to really tackle it at various scales to understand how to address some of our critical, affordable housing needs.
Rosemary Pennington
What kinds of data were you looking at? Because I feel like the demographic data you have probably is very obvious and being able to sort of count tracts of land and what buildings are where. But when you're talking about these various systems and their intersections and the scales, like what kinds of data are you looking at to be able to create a comprehensive plan for a city like DC?
Andrew Trueblood
That's a great question. And in many ways, I think one of the overlooked values of our comprehensive plan is the data. The comprehensive plan is actually broken up into a number of chapters, we call them elements. So some of them are citywide elements, including not only those things like environment, and transportation and housing, but also urban design and historic preservation. And then we have elements that look at different what we call planning areas in the city. And in each of these, we had to find data. So obviously, the census is a critical or sub data and other federal statistical agencies like the Bureau of Labor Statistics are useful. But we had to look at other administrative data in many cases, including from our various sister agencies, and sometimes also from other organizations and nonprofits that might be doing research. And so the comprehensive plan, while it is 1200 pages, if you sort of know the kinds of things you're interested in, you can go to the right chapter element and find data sources. I think there's another answer to that question. So apart from promoting the comprehensive plan as almost an index of potential data, I think it does show there are places where we have gaps, census data creates gaps, especially when you look at things geospatially. A great example is around what do we think of as a neighborhood? And how do we look at different neighborhoods in the city? In some ways, we have census data that can go to the Census block or census tract level, but whether or not those are aligned with neighborhoods is a different question. There's an interesting report that a DC government agency called DC Health put out in I think, 2017, called the Health Equity report, and they tried to kind of build neighborhood clusters, and then compare the different health outcomes across these clusters and really look at them geospatially. But that took a lot of work, it took a lot of processing. And the challenge of that is then maintaining that data and maintaining that dataset over time, one of the things that's nice about census is, is you can update it a lot easier. So those are some of the challenges you have when you try to overlay spatial data. Another great example that I like, which is the opportunity insights work that shows different outcomes, how there are different outcomes based on where you grew up, using all sorts of tax data. And so once again, taking really important administrative data, in this case, IRS, overlaying it with various data sources, but trying to understand it from a geospatial perspective.
John Bailer
You know, I think the point that you're raising is an issue of, of some things that you might think are easy to, to define might not be at your example of neighborhood is a really interesting one, because it seems like, you know, if you, you could define that in multiple ways, depending upon what input you use to sort of slice this up completely,
Andrew Trueblood
I will tell you, one thing that planning never did was define neighborhoods, because it's also emotional you identify with your neighborhood, it might be, it's a place you choose to live. And if I draw the boundary in the wrong place, you know, and neighborhood boundaries are not, you know, when we do statistics, we have to draw hard boundaries. But they're not hard. They're soft and permeable. And sometimes they're centered around a main street. Sometimes they're clear borders, around the train tracks, or a river or natural boundary. So this is for those urban planners out there. I don't know, if you're listening, Kevin Lynch's image of a city book talks a lot about these, you know, boundaries and other kinds of things that help people define their urban experience.
Rosemary Pennington
I wonder how important hearing you talk about this and who it is for people who are doing this work to sort of approach it in an interdisciplinary fashion, right, because as you as you mentioned, statisticians and anybody doing quantitative work, you have to have hard boundaries, right? Lend limits for the work that may not always reflect the realities of the lived experience. And I wonder to be able to do this work well, how important it is, is it to be able to like work with people across disciplines.
Andrew Trueblood
I think it's critical and I think about their various disciplines. So obviously, depending on what you're investigating is important, but also thinking about it from kind of an individual's experience, sort of the empathy that's required to think about what it means to be especially if you're looking at low income residents or historically excluded communities, what it means to be a part of that community, I think can have an impact on how you just think about it and how you frame some of the questions or even some of the analysis.
John Bailer
Yeah, so this leads to the,I know how difficult it is to work, you know, like with journalists, for example.
Rosemary Pennington
I am a delight, John.
John Bailer
Oh, well before I think that, you know, this, this kind of hard, hard boundaries are often things that people struggle with. And I appreciate that. I'm just curious, what other kinds of interdisciplinary team members do you have working on these kinds of problems? I'm, I'm well, imagining that someone with geographic information systems backgrounds, geographers would clearly be part of this, whether they're, they're interested in the GIS part or the human geography part. So I'm just curious who else might be part of these types of efforts?
Andrew Trueblood
Well, once again, one of the things I will say is, you know, one of the great things about urban planning is that it is so cross-disciplinary. And you know, sometimes that's challenging because sometimes, like I said before, it's hard to define, but it allows us to really look very cross-disciplinary. So, for example, in the Office of Planning, we had a transportation planner, we had a housing planner, we had an environmental planner, we had different neighborhood planners who I think were more on the side of kind of engaging with communities understanding what the challenges were, we have historic preservationists and historians, we had statisticians. So I think a whole wide variety of people are planners, but also a whole wide variety of people find their way into kind of a municipal planning office. I also should say, I think the reason we're here is I had the joy of leading the state data center. So Washington DC is obviously a city, a county and a state for federal purposes. So our state data center was housed in the Office of Planning. And so we actually had statisticians and access to data and use of data and access to the census that maybe not every municipal planning office would have.
Rosemary Pennington
You're listening to Stats and Stories. And today we're talking with Andrew Trueblood about city planning.
John Bailer
You know, you mentioned earlier that you had been involved in an Economic Intelligence Program. And I love descriptions like this one, I don't understand what they mean. So help me understand what exactly do you mean by Economic Intelligence? And what are the problems that they work on?
Andrew Trueblood
So this was an effort that I started when I joined the Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development. And there was data there, but much of it was very project level data, how many jobs is this project going to create? What is the timing for that project, and I knew that that was important. I knew that the deputy mayor and mayor wanted to be able to talk about the number of jobs and all of that. So the first thing I did was just help structure that a little bit better. But I realized, too, that we needed to be able to zoom out a little bit more and understand more context for what we're doing, looking beyond an individual redevelopment project, more at the economic winds of the city. And that was really bringing together various data sources, including employment data, including economic data, such as GDP or income, looking at real estate data, and housing data. And so it was the first time that we really built a dashboard to look at all of these things on a regular monthly basis and prepared it for the deputy mayor and the mayor. I will say we did that. And then the team itself grew to do even more sort of analytical and data work generally for the Deputy Mayor's office when I think the value that they created was seen by policymakers. And so working on all sorts of things across the government with various agencies, including my office, the Office of Planning, when I went over there, worked very closely with the Economic Intelligence Team.
Rosemary Pennington
I know part of the comprehensive plan deals with the issue of housing and affordable housing. And I know it's a huge issue in DC as it is in so many places. And I'm wondering, how do you define affordable housing? What goes into deciding what is affordable? And sort of you? How much does that reflect the sort of, again, the lived experience of people in DC?
Andrew Trueblood
That's a question that we get often. And I think it gets to the question of the scale of housing, and what are you looking at it from? So from an individual perspective, we oftentimes talk about housing affordability. And that means does it feel affordable to me? Right, and that is very broad, depending on me and feels. So I think, you know, you'll find people oftentimes, including where I live in the cities, spend more money on housing, but they might save money on transportation here, once again, you can start to see the nexus between different systems. But there is actually a federal definition for affordable housing. So when we talk about affordable housing, sometimes with a capital A and a capital H, it means that a household doesn't spend more than 30% of their income ideally for their housing. And what it does is it drives a lot of our housing policies to say that if we're stuck sizing housing based on their median income, the rent should not be above a certain percentage of their income. And so it drives almost all federal, state and local housing. What used to be called area median income now is called median family income for the real stats data nerds out there, but it's driven on that. So there's a technical answer that oftentimes I think, to get to the point of the question is not sufficient, when asked about their individual experiences. And that's one of the things we tried to do is bridge, like these policies that deal with housing at a higher system level with individual experiences that may or may not benefit from those broader policies.
John Bailer
You know, you had mentioned earlier, just before we were about to start recording, that some of your recent work has moved into topics such as measuring equity. So could you talk a little bit about what you're doing there? And what are some of the challenges?
Andrew Trueblood
Yeah, this is a topic that has come up as I've been technical advisor for the 60 finalists of the Economic Development administration's build back better regional challenge, in which equity is one of the main goals. It's about doing economic development, not only to grow the pie, but to make sure that historically excluded communities benefit from that growth in a way that hasn't always been insured in the past. So that's a great goal. But the question is, how do you ensure it, and one way is through measurement and data? And I think what we're seeing is that there is some data out there, oftentimes you have racial data, you have income data, when you talk about inequities, in terms of spatial inequities, rural versus urban, for example, or coal or manufacturing, you have some data there. But I think we're finding that really disaggregating data in a way that breaks it up by the communities that we're interested in is not as easily done, as it is said, and there's even ethical questions about whether that data ought to be collected, whether people ought to identify in some ways you don't know the outcome of something you can't measure, but measuring it raises its own ethical questions. And so I think these are really critical questions that will continue to come up and hopefully be resolved in the coming period of time, whatever that is. And I guess I would just add, that the most recent census with all of its problems, I think, raised another interesting question, which is when people identify with multiple races, how do you categorize and how do you understand that data, it becomes much more complex, and beginning to understand the nuances and complexities to be able to analyze, and to be able to understand if we're making a difference? I think that's a really critical question for our time.
John Bailer
So, you know, you mentioned a couple of aspects of it. One is growing the pie as part of this goal is this economic effort. And the other part is trying to make sure that these historically excluded communities are able to participate. So, you know, so you're evaluating, and you have this rubric for evaluating these proposals that will look at kind of the potential for pie growth, and also kind of then the proposals for thinking about how these communities will be included, that have historically been excluded. So can you give us just some sense about, you know, some some like examples? I mean, I know you can't give us one of the 60, obviously, but just sort of help us frame kind of what does that mean, in a very concrete example?
Andrew Trueblood
Sure. Well, I just want to first be clear that my work, which is actually through the national nonprofit called America Achieves, is supporting all 60. And actually, all 60 are available on the EDS website. We know who the finalists are, and I hope all of them win, even though I know that that is physically impossible, or financially impossible. I want them all to get all of the money they asked for. So I'm not on the evaluation side. I'm sort of on the cheerleading side, which has been great.
Rosemary Pennington
Yeah, that sounds amazing.
Andrew Trueblood
Yeah, and I encourage folks to take a look at the website and see this is everything from major cities, San Francisco. Newark has proposals on the poor Indianapolis and Pittsburgh, but also tribal reservations. The Hopi tribe has a proposal pal, a band of Indians have a proposal, and then rural areas, northern Wisconsin, Pennsylvania Wilds. So it's really interesting to look at how each of these places proposed to grow using the assets they have. So this is why we always kept saying this isn't your grandfather's economic development where you're chasing smokestacks and just trying to get steel jobs from another place. What you're trying to do is figure out what you offer as a place and really double down on that. And so that's been you know, that's an important piece of growing the pie and doing it in kind of an asset based way. But it's also about thinking who benefits and every community has historically excluded communities in a place like the District of Columbia, that is relatively well known. It's our black and brown populations. Oftentimes, in cases, it's our elderly populations. So we sort of know, depending on what we're looking at, what those communities are, but there are other places, maybe more rural, where it might not be necessarily racial, it might be gender or age. And so it gave each finalist the opportunity to define and understand, look back at what those historically excluded communities are, why are they excluded? And then how will this money address those causes, those root causes, and ensure that there's more equitable economic opportunity?
Rosemary Pennington
What advice would you have for someone who wants to go into this? Because it feels like urban planning is only going to get more complicated for many, many reasons. And so I just wonder for a young person or a statistician who is thinking about this as a career, what do they have to keep in mind if they want to do what you're doing?
Andrew Trueblood
Well, I think a couple of things. So number one, a statistician going into urban planning, I think is great. Oftentimes, I tell urban planners that they do need to be able to be fluent in data, oftentimes in urban planning, that's geospatial data. That's GIS and mapping. But understanding more broad or broad data is, I think, even more important, whether you're working on a small area plan with the community, or a regional transportation plan, really understanding and interrogating data is sort of the fundamental piece to being able to know what you're talking about. And I think that's my other piece of advice that I oftentimes give folks who are interested in planning, which is, know what you're talking about, like, figure out what you can have a deeper knowledge in, in a field that is so generalist, having some sort of specialized expertise is important, even if you do broad work. So I will say, you know, my background is strongly in housing and economic development, but I had to do work in transportation, historic preservation and urban design. And so I really love the opportunity to go deep in some things, but also go broad and others. And I think that's probably true for many statisticians, right? Because you can sort of apply that to anything.
John Bailer
So you know, one thing I'm sure of is that your work gets a lot of coverage, there's probably a lot of interest in the kinds of things the reports that you would issue the comprehensive plans, I can well imagine that there's a lot of journalistic interests in the work. And are there particular things that you really kind of think, as are beautifully done and easily reported? And are there other areas where you've seen some kind of challenges and how this work has been reported?
Andrew Trueblood
That's a great question. I have talked to folks about how when I joined the Office of Planning, I kind of became the spokesman for the agency in many ways. And I had had media experience in the Deputy Mayor's office, but being the principal of an agency, you're even more in the limelight, and actually ended up enjoying it. As I got used to it between working with the media and working with communities, I think I was able to refine my voice and how I communicate ideas. And I think that is kind of your question. One of the hardest things and local policy, but in state and federal policy too is being able to communicate what are relatively complex ideas. So you know, we the people listening to this probably understand when I say a housing system, what that means, you know, how it connects to a regional market, or even national or global financial flows. And all of that affects affordability. But when I'm talking to residents, or journalists, I can't lose them, right? So figuring out how you can share ideas in a way that makes sense is important. And that flows through to our reports, I was a big fan of shorter reports, the Complaint was so long, because we inherited a very long comp plan. One of the recommendations moving forward is that it needs to be much shorter to be more accessible. And that is an equity question, too. If it takes somebody hours and hours to page through dense materials that's not equitable. So thinking about who our audiences are and how we share information. One of the discussions I had with the Office of Planning is I would oftentimes get back well, this is technical writing. And I said, No, we don't do technical writing everything we do, I want somebody to be able to understand, I mean, we would do technical writing every now and then for a federal environmental impact statement or something. But for the most part, I want our work to be things that we can put on our website, and that people can understand. I would say to the second part of the question, it's really challenging to have a conversation oftentimes about data and systems when people have individual experiences. And I guess the high level example of this is all of the focus on gentrification and displacement in what when much of the data shows there are far more census tracts that are still under invested that have increased in poverty. gone down in income are up in unemployment are up in segregation, those that's still a problem in our city, in the district and in the country. But if you hear the conversation, you would think it's only about displacement, which is actually a very small percentage of the census tracts. So I think and this I see as I teach at Georgetown, you know, there's a lot of energy and focus on the things that I think resonate emotionally. But being able to take a step back contextualize it, not to say that displacement is not a problem, because it certainly is, but contextualize it and really understand and not lose sight of other big challenges and relative scales of them, I think is critical.
Rosemary Pennington
Well, that's all the time we have for this episode of Stats and Stories. Andrew, thank you so much for joining us today.
Andrew Trueblood Thanks for having me.
John Bailer Yeah. Thanks, Andrew.
Rosemary Pennington Stats and Stories is a partnership between Miami University’s Departments of Statistics, and Media, Journalism and Film, and the American Statistical Association. You can follow us on Twitter, Apple podcasts, or other places you can find podcasts. If you’d like to share your thoughts on the program send your email to statsandstories@miamioh.edu or check us out at statsandstories.net, and be sure to listen for future editions of Stats and Stories, where we discuss the statistics behind the stories and the stories behind the statistics.