Shaun Donovan

Mr. Donovan was appointed Commissioner of the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) in March 2004 by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg.  HPD is the largest municipal developer of affordable housing in the nation.  Since 1987, HPD has provided over $6.3 billion to support the repair, rehabilitation and new construction of hundreds of thousands of units of housing.

Commissioner Donovan is leading HPD in implementing Mayor Bloomberg’s ten-year $7.5 billion New Housing Marketplace Plan, which will provide 165,000 affordable homes for 500,000 New Yorkers. The housing plan is the largest municipal housing plan in the nation’s history, and is cultivating innovative partnerships and pioneering new tools in affordable housing.

Before joining the Bloomberg administration, Commissioner Donovan worked at Prudential Mortgage Capital Company as managing director of its FHA lending and affordable housing investments. Prior to Prudential Mortgage Capital, he was a visiting scholar at New York University, where he researched and wrote about the preservation of federally-assisted housing.   

Until March of 2001, he was Deputy Assistant Secretary for Multifamily Housing at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the primary federal official responsible for privately-owned affordable multifamily housing.  At HUD, he ran housing subsidy programs that provided over $9 billion annually to 1.7 million families and oversaw a portfolio of 30,000 multifamily properties with over 2 million housing units. 

Prior to joining HUD, he worked at the Community Preservation Corporation (CPC) in New York City, a non-profit lender and developer of affordable housing.  He also researched and wrote about housing policy at the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University and worked as an architect in New York and Italy.  He holds Masters degrees in Public Administration and Architecture from Harvard University.