Preparing for the future of planning: Through an endowed scholarship fund, Kevin Bush, M.U.P. ’10, hopes to help remove barriers for the next generation of planners.
Kevin Bush, M.U.P. ’10, has spent his career at the forefront of disaster recovery and climate resilience strategy, leading emergency preparedness and recovery efforts for the city of Washington, D.C., and federal housing and development programs under the Biden administration. But if it weren’t for a few encouraging friends and a well-curated summer reading list, he might never have pursued the education that set him on that path.
In 2008, Bush, was living in Southeast Michigan, working in a role he didn’t love in a job market sunk by the recession. “Several people told me, ‘You like understanding how systems work and how thriving places come to be. Have you thought about urban planning?’” he recalls.
After sampling a few books listed on the Taubman College website, he met with the admissions team and was soon registered for the next term. Today, as a principal at The Cadmus Group, Bush puts his years of public experience to work in the private sector, managing large, multidisciplinary teams to help federal, state, and local governments navigate complex climate, resilience, equity, and infrastructure challenges.
Recently, he established the endowed Kevin Bush Urban Planning Scholarship Fund as a way to help the next generation of planners navigate financial challenges that might keep them from pursuing their own dreams of a Taubman College education.
Experiential Extracurriculars
While Bush enjoyed nearly all of his classes — particularly those on planning law with Dick Norton and planning theory with June Manning Thomas — as well as working with advisor Joe Grengs, he credits mentoring experiences outside of the classroom with shaping his career, including an internship with the Michigan State Housing Development Authority and a Chicago Mayoral Fellowship.
A summer AmeriCorps program in Detroit and a vacant property survey run by Eric Dueweke turned his attention to low-income community development. Another formative project with Professor Larissa Larsen exposed him to climate adaptive sustainable building measures.
“I’ve gone back and forth between community development and climate and where they interact is kind of my sweet spot, but those really came out of extracurricular programs I had exposure to through Taubman,” he says. “A lot of my early side projects, internships, fellowships, etc., were incredibly eye opening to me and really set me on the path that I’m on now.”
Field Generalist
Right out of college, that path included working for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) as a Presidential Management Fellow, where he worked on President Obama’s Strong Cities, Strong Communities initiative and with the White House’s Council on Environmental Quality’s climate adaptation team. Hurricane Sandy hit New York a year into his fellowship, and climate change became a top priority for the administration, moving Bush’s team front and center. Joining the Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding Task Force, Bush found himself on the ground floor of a new approach to disaster recovery, as he helped launch and then expand major initiatives to not only rebuild in their aftermath but to do so with sustainability and climate resilience in mind.
When Washington, D.C., was selected in 2016 as one of 100 Resilient Cities, a worldwide initiative to help cities address 21st-century challenges led by the Rockefeller Foundation, Bush became its first chief resilience officer. A few years later, he became chief of resilience and emergency preparedness for the district’s Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency. The COVID-19 pandemic hit two months later, and there was Bush again, thinking on his feet to help navigate federal funds to not only cover emergency expenses but also plan for D.C.’s future after losses to sales tax and tourism revenues.
Under the Biden Administration, Bush returned to HUD as deputy assistant secretary for grant programs, where he oversaw a nationwide portfolio of affordable housing and community development programs, including the largest source of disaster recovery and climate resilience funding for low-income communities and the launch of a high priority $5 billion housing recovery program. “What I have found most valuable from my time at Taubman is that, as a planner, you’re basically a cities and government generalist,” Bush says. “You learn about a lot of the different systems that go into making communities better. You’re not an engineer or an architect or a fiscal analyst, but you know a little bit about each of those things, and that experience has really helped me launch very large, very new, very complicated programs over and over again.”
Planning with Purpose
Today, Bush and his family live outside of Philadelphia, where in addition to his remote work for Cadmus, he also serves on the planning commission of a 40,000-person exurban township. He’s a proud Wolverine who keeps a block M throw pillow in his office and fondly recalls crossing paths with alumni “in the strangest places,” from meeting with Julie Schneider, M.U.P. ’12, director of Detroit’s housing & revitalization department, about HUD grants, to Jonathan Tarr, M.U.P. ’11, helping him move into his first place in Washington.
Over the years, he has also made time to advise and advocate for Taubman College students. Bush is a regular speaker at career events focused on public service and, last fall, joined a panel on climate resilient communities as part of the college’s Climate Futures Symposium. When it comes to founding his own scholarship, Bush says the world will always need planners, but oftentimes talent and vision can be constrained by financial barriers.
“The future of resilient, sustainable, and just communities really depends on who gets to shape them,” Bush says. “My hope with creating this fund is to help unlock some of the potential from students who bring their lived experience, creativity, and deep sense of purpose to the field of urban planning.”
— Eric Gallippo
