Know Your Obama Underlings, Part 10

Editor's Note: This is another installment in the Rapier's profiles of Barack Obama's nominees to cabinet or high-level administration posts.
Today's Profile
Secretary of Housing & Urban DevelopmentShaun Donovan
Born January 24, 1966. Donovan is the current head of the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development, a position he has held since 2004. Born in New York, Donovan earned undergraduate and masters degrees from Harvard University, studying public administration at the John F. Kennedy School of Government and architecture at the Graduate School of Design. He is married to Liza Gilbert, a landscape architect. They have two sons, Milo and Lucas.

Before joining the Bloomberg administration in New York City, Mr. Donovan worked at Prudential Mortgage Capital Company as managing director of its FHA lending and "affordable housing" investments. In the affordable housing arena, Prudential Mortgage Capital’s portfolio totaled more than $1.5 billion in debt, including Fannie Mae, FHA and other loan types.

Prior to Prudential, Mr. Donovan was a visiting scholar at New York University, where he researched and wrote about the preservation of federally-assisted housing. He was also a consultant to the Millennial Housing Commission on strategies for increasing the production of multifamily housing. The Commission was created by the United States Congress to recommend ways to expand housing opportunities across the nation.

Until March of 2001, he was Deputy Assistant Secretary for Multifamily Housing at HUD, the primary federal official responsible for privately-owned 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.

During the 2008 United States Presidential campaign, Donovan worked for the Obama campaign.