Dan Hutch AM 1987

Linking Communities, Investing in Conservation

Growing up on Chicago’s south side, Dan Hutch, AM’87, witnessed both the “fruits and failures” of 1960s public policies and was perplexed by the number of suffering people in the world’s richest country.

“As jobs left the city, social economic status, and even the level of hope, in communities diminished while crime and despair increased,” he said. “So I was convinced that better linkages had to be made in existing institutions and more effort was needed to advocate for families locked out of America’s prosperity.”

Hutch is now an economist in the Office of Policy, Economics, and Innovation at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and has authored several articles and book chapters on sustainable and equitable development policies.

Believing he could make a difference through “informed advocacy and research,” Hutch decided to apply to public policy schools. Since graduating from the Harris School, he found his calling working for the federal government—in the Department of Labor, the General Accounting Office, and now the EPA. “The federal government was effective in the civil rights struggle,” he explained, “and there is a need for more civil servants to more effectively advocate for disadvantaged communities.”

At the EPA, Hutch works with a team charged to help communities improve environmental standards through conservation and development strategies as a part of the EPA’s Smart Growth program. According to Hutch, “improved public transit access; more walkable communities, with easy access to stores, shops, and parks; an improved jobs to housing balance; and substantial fiscal savings are fruits of smart growth endeavors.”

Hutch manages several projects which emphasize improving regional environmental outcomes for the communities and surrounding areas. He is currently supervising brownfields (vacant, and potentially contaminated, former industrial land) and smart growth grants—which help plan billions in state and private investments for better environmental sustainability—in Toledo, Ohio; Portland, Oregon; and Providence, Rhode Island. For example, both Providence and Portland have adopted plans to improve walkways and trails and brownfields in ways that will improve access to parks and other natural resources while increasing real-estate values.

“By adopting smart growth principles that include reinvestment, transportation choice, and landscape to allow plants and grasses to serve as a natural buffer and purifier of polluted water, improved environmental outcomes will result along with quality-of-life benefits of walkable communities,” he said.

Hutch also manages the Model Smart Land Development Regulations Report being published in spring 2008 with the American Planning Association, the accrediting association for U.S. urban planners. This guide will aid local, regional, and state planners and economic development organizations with broader options—including mixed use commercial and residential buildings and pedestrian and bicycle-friendly street designs—and will streamline community planning processes.

Hutch describes his work as not only providing tools to protect land, water, and air for future uses, but also affecting regional and state municipal planning. “By providing communities with resources and options to improve development choices, we can influence billions of dollars in future investments.”

And through this work, Hutch feels like he has made a difference. He links isolated communities to broader goals of environmental protection and fiscal accountability, and helps community organizations better understand how their future connects to housing, commerce, and land investments.

Read Phase I of Model Smart Land Development Regulations at http://www.planning.org/smartgrowthcodes/phase1.htm#1. For an overview of the entire two-phase project, visit http://www.planning.org/smartgrowthcodes/. Hutch contributed the chapter, “Smart Growth Tools for Revitalizing Environmentally Challenged Urban Communities” to the book, Growing Smarter: Achieving Livable Communities, Environmental Justice, and Regional Equity (MIT Press, 2007). He is also the author of “Building New Coalitions Around Brownfields Development,” PolicyMatters 3, no. 1 (2005) and “The Rationale for Including Disadvantaged Communities in the Smart Growth Economic Development Framework,” Yale Law and Policy Review 20, no. 2 (2002).