By Matt Chaban 3/29/12 11:15am

hirings and firings

He's graduated to a new gig! (Lehman College)

Adolfo Carrion, Obama’s Old Urban Czar, Picks Up His First Big Client, Nation’s Largest Hispanic Planning Firm

“I think having visited so many cities around the country, folks need help to get themselves repositioned for this global economy for the growth that is occurring,” Adolfo Carrion told The Observer a few months ago. Mr. Carrion was preparing to leave HUD, where he had landed after helping put together the White House Office of Urban Affairs, which followed his stint as Bronx Borough President.

Mr. Carrion said that he would be striking out on his own, forming a consultancy called MetroFutures to further his own urban agenda, and today he took his first big step. Read More

By Matt Chaban 2/16/12 4:06pm

Best Laid Plans

Back to the streets. (HUD/Flickr)

Adolfo Carrion Leaves HUD to Help Save Cities on His Own

Friday was Adolfo Carrion’s last day working for the Obama administration. He had been ensconced for the past two years in a corner office on the 35th floor of the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building downtown, serving as director of HUD Region 2, which is where The Observer met him a few weeks ago to discuss the president‘s flagging urban agenda.

Bronx paraphernalia filled the glass-line space. Near the doorway was a green highway sign, WELCOME TO THE BRONX. On a bookshelf behind his desk, beside family photos, books (Sonia Sotomayor’s biography, Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat) and hardhats of special significance, rested  a miniature subway sign for the 161st Street-Yankees Stadium stop. Along the wall stood a T.V. tuned to CNBC, framed newspaper clippings, and not one but two Yankees groundbreaking shovels, one of which had a bat for a handle. Pinstriped paraphernalia was everywhere, declaring the Manhattan-born, Bronx-bred politician’s on-field allegiance.

Mr. Carrion left the Bronx to go work for the administration, first on the campaign trail, then as the inaugural director of the White House Office of Urban Affairs. He left that position to come work at HUD, a move many saw as a demotion, though he insists it was always part of his plan. Read More

By Matt Chaban 2/15/12 7:30am

Best Laid Plans

(Jason Seiler)

Obama to Cities: Drop Dead—the Life and Death of a Great American Urban Policy

From his corner office on the 35th floor of the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building downtown, Adolfo Carrion could once survey much of his domain. The regional administrator for HUD Region 2, Mr. Carrion was responsible for the federal government’s housing and urban development projects in New York and New Jersey. Stretching out before the floor-to-ceiling windows is lower Manhattan. Brooklyn and Queens are off to the left. Staten Island and the Statue of Liberty peek out from behind the towers of downtown. Out across the harbor to the right is Jersey City and, off in the distance, Newark. Glory and destitution in one vista.

Peering down, it is easy to see a century’s worth of transformational urban development. The redbrick monoliths of the New York Housing Authority, the brainchild of Robert Moses and the WPA, abound. Idyllic towers propagated by LaGuardia, Rockefeller, Lindsay and a thousand other urban dreamers, these are the projects that deteriorated into The Projects. Ringing the Battery and over the bridges to Long Island are the FDR, the West Side Highway, the BQE and the rest of Moses’s great interstate network. After four decades, Battery Park City is nearly complete, built on the landfill dredged up by the World Trade Center. More than $20 billion in Liberty bonds is at work rebuilding the Trade Center and other pieces of lower Manhattan, ravaged on 9/11.

Yet for all this work, it is hard to recognize a marquee project, a bright shining beacon of the Obama administration on the scale of those that came before. Read More

By Meghan Keneally 12/02/10 11:39pm

Carrion Hints at New HUD Program, Keeps Details to Himself

Adolfo Carrion, Jr., the former White House czar on urban affairs, talked about the local emphasis of the administration’s urban development plans in a conversation with Columbia University graduate students today.

He stressed the impact that urban planning has on America’s competitiveness, linking low-income housing placement and low education standards to the nation’s global economic Read More

By Meghan Keneally 12/02/10 9:22pm

Carrion Hints at Future Run, Touts $2 Million War Chest

“I am in the public arena, I have always been in the public arena, and I will always be in the public arena,” former Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrion, Jr. told The Observer this afternoon, when asked about whether he’s planning a return to elected office.

Carrion had just finished a lecture to to graduate Read More

By Eliot Brown 5/03/10 9:59pm

Carrión Out as White House Urban Czar, Moving to HUD

Former Bronx borough president Adolfo Carrión’s tenure as President Obama’s urban policy chief is over.

Late Monday afternoon, the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development issued a statement announcing that Mr. Carrión , who was the director of the newly created White House Office of Urban Affairs, will be moving to HUD as the regional Read More

By Azi Paybarah 4/21/09 7:25pm

Ruben Diaz, After the Landslide

Today, it should be noted, is the special election for Bronx borough president, and Assemblyman Ruben Diaz Jr. is expected to win by a landslide.
Diaz will fill out the remainder of the term of his predecessor, Adolfo Carrion, and then almost surely run for re-election (and almost surely win if he does) this Read More

By Azi Paybarah 3/17/09 9:34pm

After White House Job, Carrion Spends Campaign Money

Barack Obama’s new director of urban affairs, Adolfo Carrion, donated $25,000 to the Bronx Democratic County Committee on March 5, weeks after he was tapped for his new job in Washington.
Overall, since his February 19 announcement, Carrion has spent $76,658.
Which I guess answers my earlier question.