By Adam B. Kushner

A source close to Shaun Donovan, the New York City housing commissioner, expects Donovan to be named tomorrow as President-elect Barack Obama’s nominee for Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). (UPDATE: It's official; Obama announced the pick in his Saturday video address) “It’s a done deal,” the source said. This would contradict Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrion Jr., who told an audience last week that he would be tapped. The Obama transition team did not respond to requests for comment.

Donovan, who once worked on multifamily housing units at HUD as a deputy assistant secretary, has made affordable housing the centerpiece of his term in New York. His department’s main program has been to build 165,000 units for half a million New Yorkers, making it the country’s largest housing plan. During an anticipated housing crunch because of the economic downturn, affordable-housing cred will be crucial for a HUD secretary—and useful in lobbying Congress for legislation Obama might propose.

After his first stint at HUD—where, according to his biography, he disbursed $9 billion every year to 1.7 million families—Donovan was a visiting scholar at NYU studying federal housing and how to preserve it. He is trained as an architect.

At a City Hall briefing in July, Donovan talked about the housing challenges facing Washington policymakers:

Q: Do you think there's enough of an understanding in Washington of why New York needs the kinds of investments that you want them to adopt for New York?

A: I guess I would enlarge the question a little bit. I think the fundamental challenge has been to demonstrate to the American people that they know affordable housing is important. What they don't necessarily know is that government knows how to do it right. ... The truth is, when affordable housing works, it's almost invisible. We're doing today, and lots of folks in this room are doing mixed income developments. We have a project that is moving its way through the approval and construction process right now in the Bronx that will combine market-rate condominiums with supportive housing with the formerly homeless. We are combining and integrating market-rate and affordable housing in a way that nobody would have thought possible a few decades ago. And, frankly, it means that we have to get out and tell the positive story, because a lot of folks don't even know that there's affordable housing in that building or that it's part of their community. The image that remains is this old outdated image of public housing that failed. We've got a lot of work to do to explain the advances that we've made and what we've learned and to demonstrate that yes, in fact, we will use taxpayer dollars wisely in terms of rebuilding. I think there is an opportunity, given the subprime crisis. A mentor of mine that I worked for in my first government job in Washington said, "A crisis is a terrible thing to waste." In fact, we have an opportunity, despite the terrible things that are happening in neighborhoods because of the subprime crisis, to really reframe the housing challenges, nationally, as a result of what we've seen over the last few years. Housing is on the national agenda again maybe for the first time in a generation. We have an opportunity, I think, to really utilize that to reframe the issue.

The HUD post is often occupied by a minority candidate. In this cycle, names mentioned as possible nominees included Carrion Jr. and Manny Diaz, the mayor of Miami. President Clinton chose Henry Cisneros and President Bush picked Mel Martinez, both Latinos. Martinez was succeeded by African American Alphonso Jackson. Obama has already selected one big-name Latino for the Cabinet in Commerce nominee Bill Richardson.